On board the Rampatina liner, eleven days and a half out from Liverpool, the usual terrific sensation created by the appearance of the pilot-yacht prevailed. Necks were craned and toes were trodden on as the steamer slackened speed, and a line dexterously thrown by a blue-jerseyed deck-hand was caught by somebody aboard the yacht. The pilot, not insensible to the fact of his being a personage of note, carefully divested his bearded countenance of all expression as he saluted the Captain, and taking from the deck-steward’s obsequiously proffered salver a glass containing four-fingers of neat Bourbon whisky, concealed its contents about his person without perceptible emotion, and went up with the First Officer upon the upper bridge as the relieved skipper plunged below. The telegraphs clicked their message—the leviathan hulk of the liner quivered and began to forge slowly ahead, and an intelligent-looking, thin-lipped, badly-shaved young man in a bowler, tweeds, and striped necktie, introduced himself to the Second Officer as an emissary of the Press. “Mr. Cyrus K. Pillson, New York Yeller.... Pleased to know you, sir,” said the Second Officer; “step into the smoke-room, this way. Bar-steward, a brandy cocktail for me, and you, sir, order whatever you are most in the habit of hoisting. Whisky straight! Now, sir, happy to afford you what information I can!”
“I presume,” observed the young gentleman of the 2Press, settling himself on the springy morocco cushions and accepting the Second Officer’s polite offer of a green Havana of the strongest kind, “that you have had a smooth passage, considerin’ the time of year?”
“Smooth....” The Second Officer carefully reversed in his reply the Pressman’s remark: “Well, yes, the time of year considered, a smooth passage, I take it, we have had.”
“No fogs?” interrogated the young gentleman, clicking the elastic band of a notebook which projected from his breast-pocket.
“Fogs?... No!” said the Second Officer.
“You didn’t chance,” pursued the young gentleman of the Press, taking his short drink from the steward’s salver and throwing it contemptuously down his throat, “to fall in with a berg off the Bank, did you?”
“Not a smell of one!” replied the Second Officer with decision.
“Ran into a derelict hencoop, perhaps?” persisted the young gentleman, concealing the worn sole of a wearied boot from the searching glare of the electric light by tucking it underneath him, “or an old lady’s bonnet-box? ... or a rubber doll some woman’s baby had lost overboard? No?” he echoed, as the Second Officer shook his head. “Then, how in thunder did you manage to lose twenty feet of your port-rail?”
“Carried away,” said the Second Officer, offering the young Press gentleman a light.
“No, thanks. Always eat mine,” said the young Press gentleman gracefully.
“Matter of taste,” observed the Second Officer, blowing blue rings.
“I guess so; and I’ve a taste for knowing how you came,” said the young Pressman, “to part with that twenty foot of rail.”
“Carried away,” said the Second Officer.
3“I kin see that,” retorted the visitor.
“It was carried away,” said the Second Officer, “by an elephant.”
“A pet you had running about aboard?” queried the Pressman, with imperturbable coolness.
“A passenger,” returned the Second Officer, with equal calm.
There was a snap, and the Pressman’s notebook was open on his knee. The pencil vibrated over the virgin page, when a curious utterance, between a wail, a cough, and a roar, made the hand that held it start.
“Yarr-rr! Ohowgh! Yarr!” The melancholy sound came from without, borne on the cool breeze of a late afternoon in March, through the open ventilators.
“Might that,” queried the young gentleman of the Press, “be an expression of opinion on the part of the elephant?”
“Lord love you, no!” said the Second Officer. “It’s the leopard.” He added after a second’s pause: “Or the puma.”
“Do you happen to have a menagerie aboard?” inquired the Pressman, making a note in shorthand.
“No, sir. The beasts—elephants, leopards, and a box of cobras—are invoiced from the London Docks to a wealthy amateur in New York State. Not an iron king, or a corn king, or a cotton king, or a pickle king, or a kerosene king,” said the Second Officer, with a steady upper lip, “but a chewing-gum king.”
“If you mean Shadland C. McOster,” said the Pressman, “my mother is his cousin. They used to chew gum together in school recess, sir, little guessing that Shad would one day soar, on wings made of that article, to the realms of gilded plutocracy.”
“I rather imagine the name you mention to be the right one,” said the Second Officer cautiously, “but I won’t commit myself. The beasts shipped from Liverpool 4are intended as a present for the purchaser’s infant daughter on her fifth birthday.”
“Yarr-rr! Ohowgh! Ohowgh!” Again the coughing roar vibrated through the smoke-room. Then the chorus of “Hail Columbia!” rose from the promenade deck, where the lady passengers were assembled ready to wave starred and striped silk pocket-handkerchiefs and exchange patriotic sentiments at the first glimpse of land.
“It’s not what I should call a humly voice, that of the leopard,” observed the Pressman, controlling a slight shiver.
“Children have queer tastes,” said the Second Officer. “And it’s as well Old Spots is lively, as Bingo’s dead.”
“Bingo?” queried the Pressman.
“Bingo was the elephant,” said the Second Officer, passing the palm of his brown right hand over his upper lip as the Pressman made a few rapid notes. “And if the particulars of the deathbed scene are likely to be of any interest to you—why, you’re welcome to ’em!”
“You’re white!” said the Pressman warmly, licking his pencil. “What did your elephant die of?”
“Seasickness!” said the Second Officer calmly.
“I’ve seen a few things worth seeing—myself,” said the Pressman enviously, “but not a seasick elephant.”
“With a professional lady-nurse in attendance,” said the Second Officer; “all complete from stem to stern, in her print gown, white apron, fly-away cap-rigging, and ward shoes.”
The Pressman grunted, but not from lack of interest. Doubled up in the corner of the smoke-room divan, his notebook balanced on his bulging shirt-front, he made furious notes. The Second Officer waited until the pencil seemed hungry, and then fed it with a little more information.
5“When that girl came aboard at Liverpool with her mackintosh and holdall and little black shiny bag,” he went on, “I just noticed her in a passing sort of way as a fresh-colored, tidy-looking young woman, rather plump in the bows, and with an air as though she meant to get her full money’s worth out of her eleven-pound fare. But our cheap tariff had filled the passenger-lists fairly full, and I’d a long score of things to attend to. A special derrick had had to be rigged to sling the elephant’s cage aboard, and a capital one it was, of sound Indian teak strengthened with steel—must have cost a mint of money. We stowed it, after a lot of sweat and swearing, on the promenade deck, abaft the funnels, bolting it to rings specially screwed in the deck, passing a wire hawser across the top, which was made fast to the port and starboard davits, and rigging weather-screens of double tarpaulin to keep Bingo warm and dry. The other beasts we shipped under the lee of the forward cabin skylight; and I’d just got through the job when a quiet ladylike voice at my elbow says:
“‘If you please, officer, with regard to my patient, I wish to know——’
“‘Ask the purser, ma’am,’ I said, rather snappishly, for I was hot and worried ... ‘or the head-stewardess.’
“‘I have asked them both,’ says the voice in a calm, determined way, ‘and have been referred to you.’
“‘Well, what is it?’ says I.
“‘By mistake,’ says the young lady—for a young lady she was, and a hospital nurse besides, neatly rigged out in the usual uniform—‘by mistake I have had allotted to me a bedroom on the ground-floor, so far from my patient that I cannot possibly hear him should he call me in the night. And,’ she went on, as the breeze played with her white silk bonnet-strings and the wavy little kinks of soft brown hair that framed her forehead, 6‘and I want you to move me to the upper floor at once.’
“‘You mean the promenade deck, madam,’ says I, smoothing out a grin, though I’m well enough used to the odd bungles land-folks make over names of things at sea.”
The flying pencil stopped. The Pressman looked up, turning his shortened cigar between his teeth.
“When do we come to the elephant?” he asked.
“We’re at him now,” said the Second Officer. “‘You mean the promenade deck,’ says I. ‘Does your patient occupy one of the cabins on the port or the starboard side, and may I ask his number and name?’ Then she smiled at me brightly, her eyes and teeth making a sort of flash together. ‘He doesn’t have a cabin,’ says she; ‘he sleeps in a cage. My patient is Bingo, the elephant!’”
“Great Pierpont Morgan!” ejaculated the Pressman. His previously flying pencil became almost invisible from the extreme rapidity with which he plied it. Drops of perspiration broke out upon his sallow forehead. “Glory!” he cried. “And not another man thought it worth while to run out and tackle this wallowing old tub but me!”
“I touched my cap,” went on the Second Officer, “keeping down as professionally as I could the surprise I felt.... ‘Do I understand, madam,’ I asked, ‘that you are the elephant’s nurse?’ And at that she nodded with another bright smile, and told me that she was Nurse Amy, of St. Baalam’s Nursing Association, London, specially engaged by the American gentleman who had bought the elephant——”
“Shadland C. McOster,” prompted the Pressman, without looking up.
“To attend to the animal on the voyage. It was understood that if the principal patient’s condition permitted, 7Nurse Amy was to pay the leopards such attentions as they were capable of appreciating, but there was no pressure on this point.”
“Ohowgh!” coughed the voice outside. “Yarr! Ohowgh!”
“He smells the land, I guess,” said the Pressman.
“Or the niggers,” suggested the Second Officer. “You ought to have heard Bingo when we were three days out from the Mersey.... We’d had a fair wind and a smooth sea at first, and nothing delighted the ladies and children on board like feeding him with apples, and nuts, and biscuits, and things prigged from the saloon tables. The sea-air must have sharpened the beast’s appetite, I suppose, for that old trunk of his was snorking round all day, and the Purser, who was naturally wild about it, said he must have put away hogsheads of good things in addition to his allowance of hay, and bread, and beetroot, and grain, and cabbages, and sugar——”
“Was he ca’am in temper?” asked the Pressman.
“Mild as milk.... As kind a beast as ever breathed; and elephants do a lot of breathing,” said the Second Officer. “The ladies and gentlemen in the upper-deck cabins used to complain about his snoring in the night; but as Nurse Amy said, there are people who’d complain about anything. And some of ’em didn’t like the smell of elephant—which, I’ll allow, when you happened to get to wind’ard of Bingo, was—phew!”
“Pooty vociferous?” hinted the Pressman.
“Until,” went on the Second Officer, “Nurse Amy took to washing him with scented soap.”
The pencil stopped. The Pressman looked up with circular eyes. “Scented——”
“Soap,” said the Second Officer. “No expense was to be spared—and we’d several cases of a special toilet 8and complexion article on board. By the living Harry! if you’d seen that elephant standing up over his morning tub of hot water, swabbing away at himself with a deck-sponge Nurse Amy had soaped for him, and then squirting the water over himself to rinse off the soap, you’d have believed in the intelligence of animals. The sight drew like a pantomime.... But by the sixth day out Bingo had given up all interest in his own appearance. The weather was squally, a bit of a sea got up, hardly a passenger put in an appearance at the saloon tables, and Bingo only shook his ears when the bugle blew, and turned away from his morning haystack and mound of cabbages with disgust. Nurse Amy got him to eat some biscuits and drink a bucket of Bovril, but you could see he was only doing it to oblige her. ‘Oh, come, cheer up!’ she said in a brisk, professional way. ‘You’ll get your sea-legs on directly and the officer says we’re having a wonderfully smooth passage, considering the time of the year.’ But Bingo only sighed, and two tears trickled out of his little red eyes, as he swayed from side to side. ‘He’ll be worse before he’s better,’ says I; for somehow I was generally about when Nurse Amy was looking after her big charge. ‘He’ll be worse before he’s better,’ and he was.”
The Pressman’s face was streaked and shiny, his hair lay glued to his brow. The pencil went on, devouring page after page.
“Nurse Amy, luckily for her patient, was not upset by the pitching of the vessel, for it blew half a gale steady from the sou’-west, and the old Centipede dipped her nose pretty frequently. Nurse was as busy as a bee endeavoring by every means she could devise or adopt from the suggestions of the stewardesses, who showed a good deal of interest in her and her charge, to alleviate the sufferings of Bingo. I have seen that little woman stand for an hour on the wet planking, 9holding a six-foot deck-swab soaked with eau-de-Cologne to Bingo’s forehead....”
The Pressman jotted down, breathing heavily. “Deck-swab soaked in eau-de-Cologne....” he muttered. “Must have cost slathers of money, I reckon——”
“No expense was to be spared,” the Second Officer reminded him gently. “As for the brandy, Martell’s Three Star, he must have put away a dozen bottles a day.”
“No blamed wonder his head ached!” said the Pressman, moistening his own dry lips.
“Except an occasional bucket of arrowroot with port wine and a tin or so of cuddy biscuits, the animal would take no other nourishment whatever,” continued the Second Officer. “As he grew weaker and weaker, it was touching to see the way in which he clung to Nurse Amy.”
“Clung to her?” the Pressman wrote, marking the words for a headline.
“Fact,” said the Second Officer. “He would put his trunk round her waist, and lay his head on her shoulder as she stood on a ladder lashed against the side of his cage. And he would hang out his forefoot to have his pulse felt, quite in a Christian style. Then when Nurse Amy wanted to take his temperature, the docile brute would curl up his fire-hose—I mean his trunk—and open his mouth, so that the instrument might be comfortably placed under his tongue.”
“By gings, sir, this story is going to knock corners off creation!” gasped the Pressman, pausing to wipe his face with a slightly smeary cuff. “An elephant that understood the use of the therm—blame it! that beast robbed some man of a fortune when he passed in his checks!”
“We lost so many of the ordinary kind of instrument in this way,” went on the Second Officer, almost pensively, 10“that at last Nurse Amy was obliged to fall back upon the large thermometer and barometer combined that usually hung in the first saloon. But it recorded, to our sorrow, no improvement. The mercury steadily sank, and it became plain to Nurse Amy’s professional eye that her patient was not long for this world.”
“Say, do you believe elephants have souls?” queried the Pressman. The Second Officer deigned no reply.
“She could not leave him a moment; he trumpeted so awfully when he saw her quit his side. I forgot to tell you that from the moment he first felt himself attacked by sea-sickness his bellows of rage and agony were frightful to hear. The other animals became excited by them; they roared and snarled without cessation.”
“Raised general hell,” said the Pressman, “with trimmings.” But he wrote down with a sign that meant leaded spaces and giant capitals:
“PANDEMONIUM IN MID-OCEAN!”
“Nobody on board got a wink of sleep,” said the Second Officer—“that is, unless the devoted Nurse Amy was by the sufferer’s side. Towards the end, when, exhausted by days and nights of arduous nursing, the devoted girl had retired to her deck-cabin to snatch a few moments of much-needed rest, the entire crew vied with each other in efforts to pacify Bingo, without the slightest effect. When they tried to put his feet in hot water he mashed the ship’s buckets like so many gooseberries, and shot the Purser down with half a trunkful of hot cocoa, which had been offered as a last resource. But on Nurse Amy’s appearing he grew pacified, and from that moment until the end the heroic woman never left his side. I begged her to consider herself and those dear to her,” said the Second Officer, with a little 11tremble in his voice, “but she only smiled—a worn kind of smile—and said that duty must be considered first. I won’t deny it,” said the Second Officer, openly producing a very white pocket-handkerchief and unfolding it. “I kissed that woman’s hand as though she had been the Queen.” He concealed his face with the handkerchief and coughed rather loudly.
“The Rude Shellback Touched to the Quick,” wrote the Pressman. “He Sheds Tears.” “Get on with the death-scene, sir, if you don’t object!” he said, breathing through his nose excitedly. “If that elephant asked for a minister, I’d not be surprised!”
“He did make his will, after a fashion,” said the narrator. “You see, during the convulsive struggles I have described, when he broke off his right tusk—didn’t I mention that?”
“No!” denied the Pressman.
“He broke it, anyhow, right off short, as a boy might snap a carrot,” said the Second Officer. “There it lay, among the litter, in the bottom of his cage. He had suddenly ceased trumpeting, and a deathly silence had fallen on all creation, one would have said. The vessel still rolled a bit, but the wind had fallen, and the sun was going down like a blot of fire, on the——”
“Western horizon,” wrote the Pressman.
“Nurse Amy, from her ladder, still rendered the last offices of human kindness to the sinking animal, sponging his forehead with ice-water and fanning him with a bellows. As she whispered to me that the end was near, Bingo opened his eyes. With an expiring effort he lifted the broken tusk from the bottom of the cage, dropped it on the deck at his faithful Nurse’s feet, uttered a heavy groan, threw up his trunk, sank gently forward upon his massive knees, and died!”
“The editor of the opposition paper will do another die when he runs his eye over the Yeller to-morrow 12morning,” said the Pressman, joyfully smacking the rubber band round the filled notebook. “And the port-rail got carried away when you yanked the body overboard?”
“We couldn’t stuff him,” said the Second Officer with a sigh. “As for preserving him in spirits, we hadn’t enough spirits left to think of it. We rigged a special derrick, and heaved Bingo overboard, carrying away, as you have guessed, the port-rail in the operation. As Bingo’s tremendous carcass rose and floated buoyantly away to leeward, back and head well above the water, and the two great ears resting flat upon the surface like gigantic lily-pads, Nurse Amy uttered a faint cry and swooned in my arms.”
“Some folks get all the luck!” commented the Pressman, who, having filled his book, was now jotting down notes upon his left cuff.
“You’ve not much to complain of, it strikes me!” observed the Second Officer, with a glance at the crammed notebook.
“I guess that’s true!” said the Pressman, with a sigh of satisfaction. “Now, all I want is a photograph or a sketch of that splendid heroine of a girl, and the honor of shaking her hand, and telling her she deserves to be an American—and I’d not trade places with the President.”
The Second Officer appeared to be struggling with some emotion. The muscles of his mouth worked violently. He reddened through the red, and suspicious moisture shone in his eyes. One by one the members of the silent but not unappreciative audience of male passengers that had gradually gathered within earshot of the Second Officer and his victim, manifested the same symptoms. And glancing for the first time at those listening faces, and observing the identical expression stamped upon each, the Pressman, encircled by wet, crinkled eyes, 13and cheerfully-curled-back lips, fringed with teeth in all stages of preservation, grasped the conviction that he had been had. And at this crucial moment the hatch-door of the smoke-room rolled back in its brass coamings, and a pointed gray beard and kindly keen eyes, sheltered by the peak of a gold-laced cap, appeared in the aperture.
“New York Harbor, gentlemen,” said the Captain genially. “We’re running into the docks now, and the Custom House officers will board us directly.... I shouldn’t wonder,” he continued, as the majority of the occupants of the smoke-room one by one glided away, “if the newspapers made a story out of our missing port-rail!”
“Permit me to introduce myself as a reporter of the N’York Yeller,” said the young gentleman in tweeds, as he rose and touched his hat. “Perhaps, sir, you would favor me with the facts in connection with the occurrence?”
“Haven’t you had it from Murchison? Why, Murchison——” the Captain was beginning, when with a choking snort the Second Officer rushed from the smoke-room. “Though there’s nothing to tell, Mr. Reporter, worth hearing. A derrick-chain broke at Southampton Docks, and a case of agricultural machine-parts did the damage. We temporarily repaired with some iron piping, and a length of wire hawser; but, of course, it shows badly, and suggests——”
“A collision!” said a smiling stranger.
“Or an elephant,” said another.
“Yarr!” proclaimed the horrible voice outside. “Ohowgh! Yarr!”
“I understand,” said the Pressman with an effort, “that the elephant emanated from the teeming brain of Mr. Murchison. But the leopard—there is a leopard, I surmise, if hearing goes for evidence?”
14The Captain’s excellent teeth showed under his gray mustache. “That noise, you mean?” he exclaimed.... “Oh, that’s one of our electric air-pumps, for forcing air into the lower-deck storage chambers, you know. She’s out of gear, and lets us know it in that way. Must have her seen to at New York. Take a drink, won’t you? Come, gentlemen, order what you please.”
“Whisky, square,” murmured the Pressman, as the long, smooth glide of the liner was checked, the engines throbbed and stopped, and the dull roar of the docks pressed upon listening ears. He drank, and as the fluid traversed the usual channel, his eye grew brighter.... “Say, Captain,” he asked, “do you know where your Second Officer was raised?”
“Murchison comes, I believe, from Yorkshire,” said the Captain. “Hey, Murchison, isn’t that the place?”
“I am not acquainted with the geology of Yorkshire,” observed the Pressman, as he passed the Second Officer on his way to the smoke-room; “but the soil grows good liars! So long!”