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OceanofPDF.com
Copyright © 2022 by Alice Bienia

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any format, or by any electronic

or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems,
without written permission from the author, or used in any manner without
the express permission of the author. Requirement of author consent is not,
however, necessary for the use of brief quotations in critical articles or book
reviews. Requests for permission to reproduce selections from this book can
be made to [email protected]

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events,

and incidents, other than those clearly in the public domain, are either
products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any
resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events or locales, is
purely coincidental.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-990193-11-8 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-990193-12-5 (EPUP)

Editing by: T. Morgan Editing Services

Cover Design by: Damonza.com

Published by: Cairn Press | Calgary, Alberta, Canada

OceanofPDF.com
ALSO BY ALICE BIENIA

Jorja Knight Mystery Series

Knight Blind

Knight Trials

Knight Shift (prequel)

Three Dog Knight

Knight Vision

Knight In The Museum

Anthologies

Last Shot

Crime Wave

The Dame Was Trouble

For Sean and Katherine, with love.
OceanofPDF.com
Contents
1. ONE

2. TWO

3. THREE

4. FOUR

5. FIVE

6. SIX

7. SEVEN

8. EIGHT

9. NINE

10. TEN

11. ELEVEN

12. TWELVE

13. THIRTEEN

14. FOURTEEN

15. FIFTEEN

16. SIXTEEN

17. SEVENTEEN

18. EIGHTEEN
19. NINETEEN

20. TWENTY

21. TWENTY-ONE

22. TWENTY-TWO

23. TWENTY-THREE

24. TWENTY-FOUR

25. TWENTY-FIVE

26. TWENTY-SIX

27. TWENTY-SEVEN

28. TWENTY-EIGHT

29. TWENTY-NINE

30. THIRTY

31. THIRTY-ONE

32. THIRTY-TWO

33. THIRTY-THREE

34. THIRTY-FOUR

35. THIRTY-FIVE

36. THIRTY-SIX

37. THIRTY-SEVEN

38. THIRTY-EIGHT
39. THIRTY-NINE

40. FORTY

41. FORTY-ONE

42. FORTY-TWO

43. FORTY-THREE

44. FORTY-FOUR

45. FORTY-FIVE

46. FORTY-SIX

47. FORTY-SEVEN

48. FORTY-EIGHT

49. FORTY-NINE

50. FIFTY

51. FIFTY-ONE

52. FIFTY-TWO

53. FIFTY-THREE

54. FIFTY-FOUR

55. FIFTY-FIVE

56. FIFTY-SIX

57. FIFTY-SEVEN

58. FIFTY-EIGHT
59. FIFTY-NINE

60. SIXTY

61. SIXTY-ONE

62. SIXTY-TWO

63. SIXTY-THREE

64. SIXTY-FOUR

65. SIXTY-FIVE

66. SIXTY-SIX

67. SIXTY-SEVEN

68. SIXTY-EIGHT

69. SIXTY-NINE

70. SEVENTY

71. SEVENTY-ONE

YOUR FREE BOOK IS WAITING

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

OceanofPDF.com
 ONE

I noticed him right away. The guy was twitchy, like he’d just done
something stupid or was about to. You didn’t have to be a cop or a private
investigator to figure out he was up to something, although being the latter
made me predisposed to noticing such things. I pulled my sunglasses down
over my eyes, shook back my shoulder-length bob, and stepped out of the
Starbucks into the sunshine.

Keeping a firm hand on my pocketbook, I strode past several patrons

lingering on the sidewalk in front of the coffee shop. The man with the
shifting feet and buggy eyes stepped closer to the cluster of people, trying
to make it look like he was one of them, and doing a poor job of it. His eyes
never focused on any one thing; his head swivelled from side to side as he
scanned for who knows what. I gave him a wide berth and gazed across the
parking lot. The sun gleamed off the rows of cars. Everyone moved at a
leisurely pace.

The maples and ash trees were ablaze in autumn colours, their red and
golden leaves a sharp contrast against the pale-blue sky. Soon they’d be
carpeting the ground. It would happen quite suddenly; a gust of wind would
strip the branches, sending down a cascade of leaves from their lofty
heights. Nature’s reminder that life marched on, and nothing we could do
would change it. I shook off a twinge of melancholy and crossed the lane to
where my car was parked.

Resting my coffee momentarily on the car roof, I noticed the barista had
spelled my name Georgia not Jorja. I had equal luck with the correct
spelling of my last name, Knight. I unlocked the door and slid in. Resettling
my coffee in the cup holder, I pulled down the sun visor, applied lip gloss,
and tucked a strand of my newly cut, dark-brown hair behind my ear.

A noise startled me. I turned as the passenger door opened. The man I’d
noticed in front of the Starbucks jumped into the seat next to me.

“Drive! Drive!” His blue-grey eyes bulged as they darted from side to side.
His head whipped around to the rear window and back to me.
My hands tightened on the steering wheel, my nails digging into my palms.
Blood pounded in my ears. He was beyond twitchy now. I could smell his
frenzied panic.

“Go, dammit. Go.”

He glanced over his shoulder and swore. He turned to me, his eyes jumping
wildly, his forehead beaded with sweat.

The noise of the outdoor mall faded. Everything around me slowed, each
second stretched to ten.

His face was thin and pockmarked. One of his front teeth was angled to the
rest. His thin lips moved. He was shouting again, but the words didn’t
register. A speck of spittle left his lips and arched toward me. My eyes
locked with his, my breath caught in my throat. A drop of sweat rolled
down his face and dangled at his jawline.

This can’t be happening.

A burst of adrenaline shot through me.

I turned. My hands clawed at the door handle; my shoulder rammed the

door. My foot shot out onto the pavement. I felt the car shift.

I scrambled out, wasting a precious second to glance back.

The passenger door stood open. The man was gone. My knees already
rubbery from the adrenaline spike.

Leaning one hand on the car roof, my eyes swept the parking lot. Customers
sauntered down the aisles, the sun glistened off the cars around me. All the
familiar noises of the outdoor mall returned.

Someone shouted.

I turned in time to see my unwanted passenger push a man aside, leap over
a black lab that was tied to a lamppost and disappear around the corner of
the Starbucks. Several people stared after him.
I blew out the breath I’d been holding. The world was churning out more
and more crazies. The stress was going to kill us all.

I shook my head and slid back into the car.

My hand trembled as I pushed up my sunglasses and stared into the visor

mirror. Hazel eyes speckled with yellow flecks looked remarkably
unperturbed despite the loops and gyrations my organs performed inside. I
slid my glasses back down, picked up my coffee and took a sip. Cradling
the hot cup against my chest, I tried to process what just happened while the
rest of me caught up. An attempted carjacking? Should I report it? More
than likely just a poor soul suffering from a psychotic episode. I scanned the
parking lot, but all was calm, everything back to normal.

I turned the key, still dangling from the ignition, and the engine sputtered to
life. A light on the dashboard told me one of the doors was still open. I
glanced at the passenger door. It had swung closed but wasn’t quite shut. I
set my coffee down, leaned over the passenger seat, tugged the door handle,
and it clicked shut. That’s when I noticed it.

A small white triangle poked up from between the door and the passenger
seat, barely visible. Sprawling across the seat, my fingers teased the white
triangle upward until I could get a grip. I pulled out a business envelope,
folded over in half. It wasn’t mine. My heart rate shot up.

I unfolded the envelope. There was nothing written on either side. I lifted
the flap and peered inside. Puzzled, I pulled out two pieces of newsprint,
each folded over several times. A headline came into view as I unfolded the
first newspaper clipping. “Massive Winnipeg drug bust collapses. Defence
claims police accessed lawyers’ communications.”

I scanned the article. Apparently, the largest drug bust in the region’s
history collapsed before it reached trial. The prosecution’s case crumbled
after defence lawyers attacked police conduct in the investigation, claiming
they violated solicitor-client communication privileges. Charges were
stayed.
I folded the article, and the headline of the second clipping caught my eye.
“Ancient curse drives businessman to take his own life.” My right eyebrow
rose.

I spread open the second article and skimmed the story. Guy Palermo, a
well-known businessman in the energy service sector, had thrown himself
off a forty-two-storey high-rise, here in Calgary. An avid collector of
Mesoamerican and pre-Columbian artifacts, Palermo had blamed a string of
bad luck, including a house fire, the death of his wife, and failure to win an
expensive lawsuit, on an ancient jade statue he had recently acquired. The
article went on to talk about the power of myths and referenced several
ancient artifacts said to be imbued with supernatural powers to heal the
sick, curse wrongdoers, or bring people back from the dead.

I checked the dates of the newspaper clippings. The first one was three
years old, the one about Palermo had been published last month. I slipped
the clippings back into the envelope and threw it onto the passenger seat. I
didn’t know much about ancient civilizations, but I did know that since the
earliest of times, humans have attributed events, both good and bad, to
creatures, gods, entities not of this world. It’s much easier to believe that the
universe is ordered, that the chaos around us isn’t random, that someone or
something is in charge.

The man’s face came back to mind as I exited the parking lot, my hands still
shaky from our brief encounter. It brought back memories of my assailant,
Jason Marr, the man who became the impetus for my decision to leave my
job as a forensic lab analyst to become a private investigator, but I had
never seen anyone’s eyes look as terrified as the stranger who tried to hijack
my car. If anyone feared for his life, it was him.
OceanofPDF.com
 TWO

I looped the burgundy strips of silk into a loose bow, admiring the well-
defined muscles in my arms. My last few cases had required more of me
physically than I ever imagined, so I started lifting weights and joined a
kickboxing class. Who knew six months could make such a difference? I
debated going as is, then reminded myself the men at the event would likely
be wearing suits. I pulled a black jacket from the closet and slipped it on
over my sleeveless blouse.

As I walked back into the living room, something on the TV caught my eye.
I reached for the remote and turned up the volume.

“Police have identified yesterday’s hit-and-run victim as Jeff Nickleson.

Nickleson was found on 14th Street SW, just south of 90th Avenue, at
around 4 p.m. He was declared dead at the scene. A light-grey or silver,
newer-model Toyota GT86 was seen speeding away from the area. Police
would like to speak to the driver of that car or with anyone who saw the
incident or has information about what happened.”

I stared at the photo that popped up on the screen. It was the man who had
jumped into my car. I thought back to how he had shifted from group to
group on the sidewalk in front of Starbucks, how his eyes had searched the
parking lot, how his face twitched as he tried to blend in. And his obvious
fear and panic in my car. Poor guy. He must have run into traffic.

I turned off the TV, grabbed my purse, and locked up. Yesterday’s incident
replayed in my head as the elevator whisked me down to the underground
parking garage. Should I let the police know I saw Jeff Nickleson shortly
before he was killed? I wouldn’t be able to tell them much, other than he
appeared frightened and panicked. Had someone been chasing him? And
what about the newspaper articles he left behind. Could they have any
significance? Of course, his state of mind could have just as easily been
drug induced. Either way, the poor man had run into traffic and lost his life.

Downstairs, I thumped the hood of my 2004 Ford Taurus wagon, and a

black cat shot out from underneath. I climbed in and immediately rolled
down the window. A faint fishy odour materialized whenever the vehicle
was parked for any length of time. I was certain a fish monger had
previously leased the vehicle, and not just because of the odor. In the right
light, I could make out the outline of a fished-shaped logo that had once
graced the driver’s door.

The Taurus was leased from JumpIn Jalopies, where I leased all my
vehicles. They offered older-model vehicles for a great price. The lower
price compensated for some slight issue the vehicle came with, usually
trivial but too expensive to warrant fixing, given the vehicle’s age. The
leasing agent had assured me the Taurus was mechanically sound and this
model rated high on crash-test scores, a feature I didn’t necessarily
appreciate him pointing out. I did, however, appreciate the power of its V6
engine, and the missing back seats didn’t bother me a bit.

I pulled out of the parking garage and turned right. I loved the location of
my condo. It was located a short twenty-minute ride to Calgary’s
downtown, yet close enough to Glenmore Reservoir to let me commune
with nature.

I knew something was up when it took three lights to make my left turn
onto 14th Street. Traffic was backed up behind and in front of me as far as I
could see. I glanced at my watch. I hated being late almost as much as Luis
hated me being late.

Detective Inspector Luis Azagora headed up the Special Crimes Unit in

Calgary Police Services. We had been seeing each other on and off for over
a year—perhaps more off than on. Neither of us wanted a relationship that
followed the traditional steps of dating, cohabitating, engagement, and
marriage, but we both enjoyed each other’s company—and the sex. We had
formed this casual yet committed relationship, with an unspoken
understanding that work would likely take priority over personal wants and
needs. So far it was working out. Then again, we hadn’t spent enough time
together to really get on each other’s nerves.

Stuck at a red light near the Rocky View Hospital, I sent Luis a text, telling
him a massive traffic jam on 14th Street was hindering my progress. I didn’t
have many route options as I was heading to the university, to a charity
fundraiser being held in MacEwan Centre. I suddenly noticed the three-car
gap in front of me and moved forward before someone honked.

Finally on the ramp to Glenmore Trail, I could see what caused the snarl.
Several emergency vehicles stood on the right side of the freeway. The fire
department rescue boat slid quietly across the water to the northern shore of
the reservoir. Looked like there might be a covered body in the boat. Lights
flashed behind me, and traffic shifted over as far as possible to let a police
vehicle and a car with the Medical Examiner logo on the door squeeze past.
Being stuck in traffic now seemed less inconvenient somehow.

I paused just inside the door to the reception area on the second floor of
MacEwan Centre. Azagora stood talking with a high-powered group of men
and women. The man to Azagora’s right was the current Chief of Police.
Next to him, a city councillor. I recognized the tall man with silver hair as
Franklin Dirks. He was a real-estate developer and had recently announced
his plans for an entertainment park just north of the city. Next to him stood
a blonde woman, thin as a rail, with perfectly coiffed hair that didn’t move
when she did.

Another man I didn’t recognize stood with them, and a woman from the
Chief Prosecutor’s Office stood on Luis’ other side. She touched Luis’ arm,
and I watched as he bent his closely shaved head toward her, presumably to
hear what she was saying. He threw back his head and laughed. I gritted my
teeth and headed to the bar.

I had noticed little miss prosecutor on several other occasions. Even though
Luis and I were spending time together, he often chose to go to public
events, like this one, on his own. I got the distinct impression he didn’t want
to raise speculation that we might be a couple. Azagora had his eye on
deputy chief or chief of police, but it wasn’t his ultimate goal. The man had
political aspirations and his squeaky-clean reputation made him a good
future candidate, although some days I wondered if that was no longer
needed as a qualifier for public office.

He had no problem being photographed with her though. Of course, Luis

and I weren’t exactly a couple. That word had implications, at least in my
mind, which weren’t being fulfilled. I pushed away the little green dragon
flicking its fiery tongue in my head, as the rest of the group surrounding
Luis joined in the laughter.

We had both received an invite to tonight’s fundraiser, an annual event

hosted by Inner Light, a street ministry raising funds to tackle drug
addiction and homelessness in the city. Once we discovered we were both
attending, we decided to meet here and planned to grab a late-evening bite
once the event ended.

I took the glass of red wine the bartender poured for me and headed for the
tables displaying the items in tonight’s silent auction.

A voice called out, “Jorja.”

I turned and smiled. “Adan. Long time no see. Your events are getting
bigger and better attended each year. Congratulations!” I held up my wine
glass. “Here’s to a wildly successful night.”

Adan leaned forward and brushed his lips against my cheek. “I’m so glad
you could make it tonight. Nick’s here, too.” He looked around. “He’s
working as one of my volunteer servers tonight, but he’s also agreed to
speak later on.”

I met Adan—a street minister who offered up messy church to his growing
flock and ran a halfway house for recovering addicts—when I found myself
looking for a client’s long-lost relative, rumoured to be living rough. Nick
was one of the street people who helped me find my way through the streets
and alleys where the homeless lived, and in the process managed to find
himself.

“I’ll have to find him later. Glad to hear he’s doing well.” I noticed Luis
staring in our direction. “And you, too.” I laughed and touched Adan’s arm,
hoping it would spark the same feeling of jealousy in Luis that had run
through me a moment earlier. Feeling just a tad mortified at my blatant tit-
for-tat move, I dropped my hand. “I’m glad your work is getting the support
and recognition it deserves. I see the Chief of Police is here. And Franklin
Dirks, and oh, there’s the mayor.”

“Speaking of which, I guess I should go mingle, although I’d much rather

stay here.” His warm grey eyes crinkled as he smiled. “Stick around after, if
you can, and we can get properly caught up once this is over.”

I nodded. “I’ll try. Now go and remind all these well-heeled people why
they’re here.”

I watched Adan walk away. The man was beautiful, and not just on the
inside. I had once made a play for Adan, but it turned out being God’s
servant was a full-time job. I looked over at Luis. Maybe being a cop was,
too.

I walked over to the silent auction tables and picked out two items to bid
on. A watercolour painting of a meadow filled with bright-yellow flowers
immediately caught my eye. It reminded me of the flowers I used to pick as
a child that grew wild behind my parents’ house in Timmins, Ontario. We
called the flowers buffalo beans because each green stalk contained a
cluster of yellow bean-shaped flowers. Which didn’t explain the buffalo
reference. Then again, we were just kids.

I was upping the bid on the second item I had chosen, a pair of tickets to a
scotch-tasting event that included dinner and an overnight stay at the Banff
Springs Hotel, when I noticed Luis making his way over. God, that man
was hot. Six foot two, with dark-brown eyes and skin no glancing touch of
the sun could produce. He exuded confidence and his slight swagger—just
enough to soften his mostly serious demeanour—made him seem more
human, more approachable. I knew what lay underneath that well-cut
brown suit and felt a familiar flutter stir in my stomach.

He looked down at the bid I just made and winked at me. “You’ll need to do
better than that.” He took the pen from me and upped my bid by a hundred
dollars.
“Maybe we should pool our resources on this one.” I took the pen back and
immediately upped his bid by another fifty. Last winter, Luis and I managed
an incredibly sexy getaway weekend at Emerald Lake. We holed up in a
cabin for two whole days, the fireplace crackling day and night, the snow
drifting down steadily, erasing all signs of human presence. Perhaps this
year’s getaway could be at the Banff Springs.

“I saw you talking to Adan. He’s really done an amazing job with his
annual charity event. Remember the first fundraiser he had, in the basement
of Inner Light?”

I laughed. “Yeah, with a potluck supper to boot.”

Azagora’s eyes darkened. “I still remember what you were wearing—that

green silk thing with no back.”

I remembered the night, too—it was the first time Luis sent me any
indication he was even slightly interested in me, although I had spent
months fantasizing about him.

Luis stepped away and pulled his phone from his inside jacket pocket. I
hadn’t heard it ring, but he probably had the ringer turned off. He rubbed a
hand over his short-shorn hair, nodded his head several times, then said
something I couldn’t make out. He put the phone away and stepped back.
“Mierda,” he muttered.

“What’s up?” I asked but needn’t have bothered.

“Sorry, babe. I have to bail tonight. Can I call you tomorrow?”

“Of course. Be careful.”

I wanted to lean in, kiss him goodbye, but he was all business now, already
heading for the door. I watched as miss prosecutor set her glass on a passing
waiter’s tray and rushed off to catch up with Luis.

They wouldn’t have…would they?

OceanofPDF.com
 THREE

The lights in my office flickered and went out. I got up from my beat-up
wooden desk and made my way to the grime-encrusted window. The
building across the alley still had power. I sighed and returned to my desk.

I hadn’t stayed long at the charity gala on Friday night. Adan and I only
managed to snatch a few minutes before other gala guests, eager to talk to
him, descended upon us, so I left.

I looked around the office. A faint stale-cigarette odour clung to the walls
and remained permanently ground into the carpet. It would probably
continue to ooze out of the furnishings until the building was refurbished or
knocked down and replaced with something new. It was rather depressing.
More so now that my best friend, Gab Rizzo, the prime lessor of the space,
was in Paris, enrolled in a nine-month cooking program at the Cordon Bleu.
Her personal catering company sign, Thyme to Dine, no longer graced our
door, leaving me the sole occupant. Her most recent emails and texts were
full of talk about wanting to take a year off to travel after her program
ended—a gap year, like the one neither of us had after finishing school.

I’d have to decide if I wanted to stay here if Gab didn’t return.

My phone vibrated against the top of the wooden desk, startling me. Mike
Saunders’ name and number popped up on the screen.

“Hey, Mike. How are you doing?”

“I’m okay. Is this a bad time?”

“No, not at all. Just finished up the paperwork on the Lane case when the
lights went out in the office. I was getting ready to pack up for the day.
Why, what’s happening?”

Gab Rizzo might be my best friend, but Mike was a close second. I met him
at my former place of employment. I had just taken a job at Global Analytix
when Mike, recently retired from the Toronto Police force and bored with
his newfound freedom, signed a contract with them to help set up training
and procedures for their field analysts.

This week, Mike was in Vancouver, then heading east. He was part of a
national task force set up to develop an empathy-informed procedural
framework for decentralized 911 calls. Calls that could, in certain instances,
be assigned to social workers, drug councillors, or psychologists, and not
police.

“Glad I caught you. What’s your schedule like? Any chance you have a few
spare days?”

“I’m doing some background checks for one of my insurance company

clients but we’re talking hours of work here, not days. Do you need me to
do something for you?”

“Yes, if you don’t mind.”

Maybe he needed me to check in on his two Persian cats. His neighbour, a

spiteful little Polish woman, usually looked after them when Mike was out
of town, but on occasion he had needed me to fill in for her when she went
to look after an ailing sister somewhere. Probably Transylvania.

“Sure. What do you need?”

“You know the body they recovered from the reservoir last week?”

“No. Oh, wait. I did notice some emergency vehicles down there when I
was driving by on Friday night. I wondered if someone drowned. There’s
been nothing about it on the news, or if there was, I missed it.” Not that I
paid attention to every death in the city—like some ambulance chasers I
knew.

“Yeah. Well, they recovered the body of a cop I knew. A former mentor of
mine. He retired when I was still on the force.”

“Sorry to hear that, Mike. What happened?”

“His daughter said the ME ruled it an accidental death. She’s adamant it’s
not. She thinks he was murdered.”

“That’s tough. The ME usually gets it right. What do you think? Could it
have been an accident, or maybe suicide?”

“I guess it’s possible. He was diagnosed with lung cancer last year. He
wasn’t the kind of guy who would’ve taken to dying slowly in a hospice—
then again, he wasn’t the kind of guy who would kill himself. Can you give
Donna, his daughter, a call, talk to her?”

“Sure. She lives in Calgary?”

“Yeah. I’ll send you her contact info. Her father’s name was Howard
Bergman. After Howie retired, he became a private investigator. He moved
out west last year—wanting to reconnect with his daughter. He didn’t see
much of her while she was growing up since his ex-wife moved to Calgary
after they split up.”

“Oh, that’s too bad. She was probably just starting to get to know him.”

“She’s had a big shock and she’s upset. Maybe all she needs is to talk this
through. Or maybe she knows something. When she called, I told her I was
tied up here, but that I’d contact a good friend of mine who might be able to
hear her out—look into what happened.”

“Okay. Send me her name and number and I’ll give her a call.”

I didn’t believe for a moment that Mike believed Donna just wanted to talk.
After thirty-some years in policing, Mike had a sense for when things didn’t
sound right.
OceanofPDF.com
 FOUR

Donna lived in a modest 1950s bungalow just off Elbow Drive, near Henry
Wise Wood High School. I parked and made my way up a crumbling
sidewalk to the front door and pressed the doorbell. The door opened to
reveal a woman in her mid-forties. She was a few inches shorter than my
five feet and eight inches, and her wavy, light-brown hair was cut close to
her head.

“Hi. I’m Jorja Knight. Mike Saunders’ friend.”

Her green eyes lit up. She smiled and held out a hand to me.

“Nice to meet you, Jorja. Come in, come in.”

I stepped into a bright, well-lit interior. Someone had renovated the place, if
not recently then certainly in the last decade or so. Several interior walls
had been removed and I could see past the living area to my left all the way
back to the kitchen, which looked out onto a sunny, treed backyard.

“Would you like a coffee? I just made some.”

“A coffee sounds great. Your place is lovely. Did you do the renos?”

She laughed. “No. I moved here about eight years ago. The former owner
had just reno’ ed the place. That’s why it appealed to me.”

I followed her back to the kitchen and after she poured two coffees we sat at
a small table next to a set of patio doors which opened to a large backyard.

“Love the backyard. With all the trees, it’s like you have your own little
park.”

“I do love all the trees, but now that my daughter is off at university, I’m
going to have to rake up all those leaves myself.”

“Oh—yes, there is that. Where’s your daughter studying?”

“Lethbridge. She’s enrolled in the Criminal Justice Policing Program.” Her
voice caught. “My father was pretty darn proud of her.”

“I’m sure he had good reason to be. I’m so sorry for your loss.”

She nodded. “A police officer came to the house on Saturday. He wanted

me to provide confirmation that the man they found in Glenmore Reservoir
was my father.” She picked up her coffee, cradling it in both hands, and
stared out at the sun-dappled yard. She turned back to me. “I drove down to
Lethbridge on Sunday to tell Amanda in person. She took it pretty hard. She
wanted to come back home with me, but I told her to stay, focus on her
studies. I’m organizing a memorial service for him. She’ll come home for
that.”

“I’m so sorry. This must be so hard for you.”

“Thank you. The suddenness of his death makes it worse. I never got a
chance to say goodbye.”

I knew exactly how that felt. My own mother had been killed while I was
away at university. For years, I wondered if I could have somehow changed
the outcome if I had been there.

“I was just getting to know him. My parents split up when I was five. I
don’t have many memories of my dad from my childhood. He wasn’t
around all that much—which is why they split up in the first place. Work
always came first to my father, and it didn’t mesh with what my mom
wanted from a marriage.”

My mind immediately flashed to Mike and then to Azagora. Both of Mike’s

marriages had ended for the same reason. He once told me that even when
he was home, he really wasn’t emotionally available. His work and the
cases that haunted him were like a constant third person in their
relationship. Azagora had never married, didn’t want to.

“Yeah, unfortunately, the divorce rates for police officers are some of the
highest in the country.”
Donna nodded. “After my parents divorced, we moved to Calgary. My
grandmother, my mom’s mother, lived here. She helped raise me and looked
after me while my mother went to work.”

“Your father didn’t visit?”

“He came out here maybe three or four times while I was growing up. It
was hard to stay in touch—we didn’t have the technology we have now.
Thank goodness we do now. Amanda and I text every day and we FaceTime
two or three times a week. Of course, Lethbridge isn’t that far away, and
I’m sure she’ll be home for weekends whenever she can get away.”

“Mike said your dad retired about fifteen years ago, but he only moved out
here last year.”

“That’s right. A lot of his cop friends back in Ontario were already retired,
but as people get older, they move on, either to follow their children and
grandchildren to wherever they’ve settled or to move somewhere warmer.”

“I guess it was the former reason for your father. He sure didn’t pick
Calgary for its short, balmy winters.”

Donna laughed. “If Amanda ever got a job on the west coast, I’d be heading
out right after her. But you’re right. One day, right out of the blue, he called
me. I hadn’t seen him in over ten years. He said he was in Calgary. I
thought he’d come for a visit, but he said no, he’d relocated here.”

“That’s nice. Did you see him often after that?”

“Comparatively speaking, yes. It was awkward at first. We didn’t have

much to talk about. After five or six visits, things got easier. I had him over
for supper every couple of weeks. Amanda would join us if she was home.”

“I understand he was still working as a private investigator. I gather he

worked for himself?”

“That’s right. He loved his work. Or maybe that was just the nature of the
man—and he loved to work. It gave him purpose. That’s one of the reasons
I know he didn’t kill himself.”

Sadly, I knew people who were gainfully employed, seemingly doing okay
on the outside, who suffered tremendously and silently on the inside until
they lost their grip on life. I glanced up. Donna was still talking, her voice
quicker now.

“The trip back from Lethbridge gave me time to think. Before that, I was in
shock—working on autopilot. A few days later I managed to contact the
ME. She told me her first thoughts were that he died by suicide but after
further examination decided it was an accident. She seems to think he
slipped and fell, hit his head on a rock on his way down the slope, and
drowned once he went into the water. But it couldn’t have happened that
way. So, I called Mike.”

“Mike told me you think your father was killed—murdered. What makes
you think so?”

“Dad was working on a new case the last few weeks. He was onto
something big. He seemed happier and more excited than I’ve ever seen
him. He said after this case he might properly retire. That he always wanted
to move somewhere warm and live on a beach. Costa Rica really appealed
to him. He said he knew he hadn’t been a good father, but he meant to make
it up to me…and Amanda. That I deserved to have a better life than the one
I had growing up. That he was going to make sure I never wanted for
anything, anymore.”

“Do you know what he was talking about? Or what he was working on?”

“No. He was excited, but secretive. The last time I saw him was Tuesday…
three days before they found his body. Something had changed. He told me
to be careful, to take care of myself. He said if anything happened to him to
call his friend Mike. He often talked about Mike, and I met him this spring
when I ran into him and Dad having a craft beer on a patio at the farmers’
market.”

“That’s interesting. He didn’t elaborate on what he meant or why he thought

something might happen to him?”
“No. I laughed it off and told him nothing was going to happen to him. But
it did.” She wiped at a lone tear that spilled from her tear-filled eyes.

I took a deep breath, hoping I wasn’t about to reveal something she hadn’t
already known. “Mike said your father told him he had lung cancer. Could
he have maybe gotten a more devastating diagnosis? Maybe he was talking
about insurance money being left to you.”

Donna shook her head. “He went through chemo last year. The tumour in
his lung shrank considerably. They had him on an experimental drug, but
one they have found to be promising at keeping the tumour from growing.
He knew his life expectancy would be shorter than most, but there’s no way
he killed himself. As far as insurance money goes, he only had a small
policy, just big enough to cover his burial costs, he used to joke. His police
pension died with him. Besides, why would he have told me to contact
Mike if anything happened to him?”

“And he made that comment, what? Three days before he died. I can see
why you’d think his death might be suspicious.”

She looked at me, her eyes serious. “So, what do we do now?”

When Mike first told me Donna might just want to talk things over with
someone, I didn’t believe him. And now that I had met Donna, I was
positive she hadn’t just contacted him for sympathy. It wasn’t just the
comments her father made to her in the weeks before his death. Donna said
something had changed when she last saw him. And now that I had met
Donna, I could see she was a rational woman, one who would be prone to
think about things before offering up her opinion. In that regard, she
reminded me a bit of myself.

“Did your father keep an office, or did he work out of his home?”

“He worked from home. A studio apartment. He has this massive desk
where he kept his files and computer. Took up almost a third of his living
space.”
“Well, it may turn out he did fall, hit his head, and drown. But from what
you’ve told me, I have a sense that there was something else going on that
might have contributed to his death. It warrants a look.”

“Thank you so much, Jorja. I didn’t know what to do. If someone killed my
dad…” Her voice trailed off as her eyes welled up again. “My dad deserves
to have someone pay attention to his death.”

I left Donna’s with the address and the keys to her father’s apartment in my
pocket. If nothing else, I would love to get Donna the closure she needed.
Closure I never got with my own parents’ deaths.
OceanofPDF.com
 FIVE

I paused in front of the three-storey walk-up. This was the place. The once-
cream-coloured stucco was chipped and streaked with dirt, the windows
dark with grime. Several faint numbers were etched into the wall above the
front door. 1912. Not the address, but the year the building was built. The
front glass door had a crack running through it. I pulled it open and stepped
inside.

A set of mailboxes lined the wall to my left. Each was labelled with its
apartment number, made by one of those handheld Dymo printers. I counted
eighteen units. Howard’s apartment was 302, which I assumed would be on
the third floor.

I climbed the once-navy-blue carpeted stairs, now black with decades of

dirt and grease. The cheap, metal stair railing wobbled under my hand, and
the sticky feel of its chipped plastic top was enough for me to move to the
right and avoid touching it at all.

The apartment building was just a long, rectangular box. A hallway on each
floor ran from the front staircase straight through to a second set of stairs at
the back of the building, with four units on the left, four on the right. I
reached the third floor, which was darker than the previous two levels as the
light from the front door didn’t reach this far. Apartment 302 was the first
unit on the right.

I pulled out the set of keys Donna had given me. Four keys on a plain metal
ring. Two of the keys had a Chevrolet symbol on them. Donna had told me
he drove an old blue Chevy Malibu but wasn’t sure where it was now. I
selected one of the other keys and reached for the doorknob, the tarnished
gold of the metal mostly worn off.

The doorknob wobbled loosely in my hand. The security in this building

was nonexistent. I reached to fit the key into the lock, and the slight
pressure I applied opened the door before I even had the key fully inserted.
I pushed the door open further. The jamb was nicked and battered. I stared
at a ten or twelve-inch crack in the wood frame. My heart hammered
against my chest.

Taking one last look down the long, dim hallway, I stepped inside. The
place was dark. My fingers ran over the rough plaster, searching for a light
switch. Finding none, I reached into the back pocket of my jeans, pulled out
my cell phone, and tapped the flashlight icon.

I was in an entryway, six or seven feet in length. I spotted the light switch
several steps in from the door. Handy.

I flicked the switch, hoping the power hadn’t been turned off for some
reason. A blue-grey light flickered ahead, and the familiar buzz of a
florescent light broke the stillness.

“Hello?” I called out tentatively, getting ready to beat a hasty retreat. No

one answered.

I slid forward, keeping my back to the wall. I was breathing fast, like I’d
just finished a 10K run, which I never do.

The hallway opened into a living area and a small kitchenette on my left.
The fluorescent light buzzed, flickered, and finally emitted a garish bluish-
white light. I gasped.

Tan couch cushions lay strewn at odd angles on and around the couch, the
stuffing visible through deep slashes in the fabric. An old wooden desk
stood against heavy, dark drapes that covered the front window. The desk
drawers had been pulled out; papers scattered everywhere. A small
bookshelf lay tipped on its side, books strewn across the floor.

I stepped further into the living area and shone my cell phone light around
the room. The hairs on the back of my neck prickled.

I whipped around. No one there.

I rushed out of the apartment and into the hallway. My fingers shook as I
keyed in Donna’s phone number on my cell. She answered on the third ring.

“Hi, Jorja. What’s up?”

“I just got to your father’s apartment. I think you should come down here.
Someone’s broken into the place and trashed it.”

“Oh my god. Okay. I’m on my way.”

“In the meantime, I’ll give the cops a call. They might want to see this.”

Donna arrived before the police did. We were careful not to touch anything
as we tiptoed through the apartment. A bed was wedged into an alcove
partially tucked in behind the kitchenette, the mattress pushed to one side.
Clothes from the one small closet in the room lay on the floor. We stepped
back out into the hallway.

“Someone was looking for something,” Donna said, her eyes growing wide.

“No doubt about that. I know it’s hard to tell, but do you notice anything
missing?”

She bit her lip, then glanced back through the door. “The computer monitor
is lying on the floor, but I didn’t notice the computer.”

“He didn’t have a laptop?”

“No. I mean, maybe he also had a laptop, but he definitely had a desktop
computer with a good-sized monitor. His eyes weren’t as good as they used
to be.”

We both turned as footsteps came up the stairs. Two uniformed police

officers arrived at the top of the stairs, both young, both blond.
“You call in the break-in?” the male officer asked.

“Yes. My name is Jorja Knight. This is Donna Hart. This was her father’s
apartment.”

“Was?” He turned to Donna. “He doesn’t live here anymore?”

“My father died last week. I’ve been busy organizing his memorial service.
I asked Jorja to come here and check in on the place.” Donna looked over at
me, her eyes pleading for help.

“I got here about an hour ago,” I said. “As soon as I put the key into the
doorknob, the door opened. I noticed the frame is splintered.”

“Did you go inside?”

“Yes. I touched the wall on the right—looking for a light switch, and then
the switch, of course. As soon as the light came on it became obvious that
someone ransacked the place. I called Donna to tell her what I found and
then called you. We both went in and just surveyed the place from the edge
of the living area.”

We spent the next hour answering questions. They wanted more details
about Howard’s death, then seemed to lose interest when they heard it was
officially labelled an accident.

Donna did a walkthrough with the officer and confirmed his computer was
gone as well as his old trusty Nikon camera. She said his cell phone also
seemed to be missing and hadn’t been among the personal items that had
been returned to her at the morgue. Beyond that, it was hard to tell if
anything else was gone.

While Donna was talking to the police, I went down the back stairs and
found the parking stall for Unit 302. Howard’s Chevy Malibu wasn’t there.
I headed back upstairs to share my findings with Donna and the police.
Either someone had taken it, or it was still parked somewhere near where
Howard’s body was found.
The building manager had been located and was talking to the police. He
looked to be about eighty and was shaking so badly, I worried he might
need medical assistance.

An hour later, Donna and I were on our own.

“Constable Abbot told me he sees this sort of thing all the time. People post
an obituary for their loved ones in the paper and the next thing you know
there’s a break-in at their residence.”

“Did you post an obituary?”

“No. Dad didn’t know many people out here and he doesn’t…didn’t have
many friends. I just phoned the few people he knew and told them we’re
having a private memorial service for him on Monday at the Grayson
funeral home. I suppose I should post something in the paper. His former
work colleagues might want to know that he’s…gone.” Her voice broke.

“I think the police have this one wrong.”

“I’m so glad you’re here, Jorja. I can’t imagine having to deal with this on
my own.”

“Glad to give you a hand.” I stared at the papers scattered on the floor, a
mixture of newspaper articles, printed pages from his files, invoices, and
handwritten notes. God knows what was taken. It was going to be a
challenge to sort and put the contents back together into some meaningful
order. Maybe his files would hold some clue as to what he’d been working
on.

“If you don’t mind, I’ll stay awhile and start straightening up the place. I’ll
come back in the morning to pack up his files and take them back to my
office. Hopefully, there’s something in there that will be of use to us. I can
drop off his house keys when I’m done, so you can sort through his
personal belongings.”

“Thanks, Jorja. I guess I should clear out Dad’s stuff sooner rather than
later. The building manager was grumbling about having to secure the door
—I suppose he’ll be changing the locks.”

I nodded, but I was quite sure the door locks hadn’t been changed in years.

After Donna left, I walked over to the Safeway just down the street from the
apartment, picked up a sandwich and a coffee, and headed back. Newly
built apartment buildings defined the neighbourhood, with only the odd, old
single-family home left wedged-in between. Howard’s apartment building,
and the three-storey walk-up next to it, were relics from another era.
Whatever once stood behind them had been torn down and the reinforced
concrete walls rising from the ground told me another gleaming muti-story
tower would soon stand there.

Reluctant to leave the sunshine and fresh air behind, I climbed the dingy
stairs back to Howard’s apartment. It was going to be a long day.
OceanofPDF.com
 SIX

This morning I arrived prepared. Coffee in one hand and a few packing
boxes tucked under my arm, I climbed the stairs to Howard’s apartment. It
appeared the building manager had tightened the door handle, but my key
still worked in the lock.

Yesterday I had searched every crevice of the couch, examined each

cushion thoroughly, and set them neatly back on the couch. I didn’t know
what I was looking for but hoped that whatever someone had been
searching for hadn’t been found.

I set my coffee down, crossed the room, and pulled apart the heavy damask
drapes covering the front window. A cloud of dust floated out into the
room. Each fold in the material was faded from the sunlight, leaving a light-
coloured stripe running through the botanical pattern. Thistle flowers, red
pomegranates, and green vines wove in and around each other on an indigo
backdrop. The fabric felt brittle in my hands.

The building manager had made it clear last night that the furniture, drapes,
and the kitchenware had come with the place and were not to be removed.
As far as I was concerned, he was welcome to it. The only items that
belonged to Howard were the heavy wooden desk, a microwave, his
clothes, books, computer, and a few personal mementos.

I had a quick look through the kitchen cupboard and the medicine cabinet in
the bathroom last night. The fridge hadn’t held much—two containers of
leftovers from a takeout dinner, some wilting vegetables, and half-empty
jars and condiments, some already past their best-before date. I found
nothing hidden in the coffee beans or box of cereal.

Nothing in the medicine cabinet gave me pause, just the usual stuff—
toothpaste, deodorant, antacids, Aspirin, and Benazepril, a medication for
high blood pressure. I made note of the prescribing doctor’s name, although
I’m sure privacy laws would prevent him from sharing any useful
information about Howard’s health.
This morning I tackled the books and papers. I picked up each book, held it
upside down, and riffled the pages. Assured there was nothing hidden
between the pages, I placed each book in one of the boxes I brought. Most
of the books were thrillers—Michael Connelly, Ludlum, Harlan Coben, and
a few true crimes. Then I started on the papers. They were going to present
a bigger challenge, as many of the pages, once held in individual file
folders, were now intermixed, and scattered everywhere.

I packed the papers into a separate box to take to the office with me. I
would sort them later and hopefully be able to figure out what he had been
working on. I checked each desk drawer, inside and out, before sliding the
drawers back into place. I checked the back of the desk and the underside.

By noon, the place was almost back to normal, other than for the obvious
damage. Everything on the floor in the living room had been picked up,
allowing me to move around unencumbered. I stacked the boxes of books
and papers that I was taking with me in the hall. A bag of garbage stood
ready to take out to the dumpster—full of stuffing from the torn cushions,
along with the kitchen contents that had been dumped onto the floor.

As the chaos and clutter diminished, a sense of melancholy had grown.

Howard’s death was another reminder of how short our time on earth was,
how it could all end in a blink of the eye, usually unexpectedly. His few
earthly possessions, regardless how inexpensive or worn, possessed an
energy of their own. They were no longer inanimate objects, they had
Howard’s emotions, thoughts, and feelings attached to them. I wondered if
Donna would keep them or give them away. Sometimes mementos from
departed loved ones became a source of constant sadness instead of
comfort. That’s why I rarely wore my mother’s watch, the one and only
keepsake I had of her. I was glad I wasn’t the one who would have to decide
what to do with them.

Suddenly feeling the need for a quick break, I grabbed the bag of garbage
and made my way down the hall to the back stairs. After depositing the bag
in the garbage bin behind the building, I continued down the street to a
coffee shop and sat there for a while to clear my head. Before leaving, I
called Donna and gave her an update. I let her know I’d be returning
Howard’s keys later this evening.
Once back, I made my way into the alcove off the living room that served
as the bedroom. All that was left to straighten was the nightstand, which lay
tipped over on the floor, and to pick up the clothes where they lay after
being pushed off the few shelves or torn from their hangers. I checked the
underside of the mattress, the bedframe, and pushed the mattress back into
place.

An obviously well-used coffee mug labelled Best Dad remained on a closet

shelf. I picked up and folded the small pile of clothes that had been torn
from the hangers and placed them on the bed. Under the pile, I found a
black photo frame holding a picture of Donna and Amanda, the glass now
shattered. I shook the shards of glass into a garbage bin and laid the photo
next to the pile of clothes.

I righted the nightstand and crouched to pick up the drawer, which lay on
the floor, taking a minute to shift through the contents, some of which had
spilled onto the floor as well. A few pens, a small flashlight, a couple of
screwdrivers, a small sewing kit, a tube of gorilla glue, and some change. I
put the items into the drawer and lifted it to slide it back into the nightstand.
It wouldn’t go.

I stuck my hand into the opening and felt something on the underside.
Grabbing my cell phone, I tipped the nightstand onto its side and shone the
light into the space for the drawer. Something was taped to the underside of
the nightstand top.

Excitement replaced my earlier melancholy. I picked at the corner of the

tape holding the item in place until it gave way enough for me to pull out a
small, thin notebook. My fingers shook as I opened the faux-leather cover.

Each page was divided into three sections, each section a separate day of
the year. I flipped through it. This was Howard’s appointment book. Many
of the pages were blank, but some had notes, initials, dates, and times jotted
in them.

I sat back on my heels. Why would Howard have needed to hide his
appointment book?
OceanofPDF.com
 SEVEN

The little cogs in my head had been whirling all day, but now I was done. I
rubbed the back of my neck and looked at the mounds of paper around me.
Six piles on my desk, five more on the small round table that was crammed
into the corner of the office between two file cabinets and the window. It
had taken me six hours to sort and shift through Howard’s papers and group
them into related stacks. A thankless job but needed.

Several piles were from cases he had worked on in 2020. The files were
pretty typical—cases involving cheating husbands, a divorce dispute where
the soon-to-be ex-wife was claiming her husband was hiding assets from
her, and a woman who hired Howard to track down her kids, missing since
her ex-husband refused to return them after a court-approved parental visit.

Another pile held notes and invoices for some work he had done for a law
firm. I found a scanned copy of an insurance policy, which I added to the
pile. The relevant names, dates, and many of the details had been blacked
out, leaving me not much to read. Looked like he may have been
investigating an insurance fraud.

A separate yet unsorted pile contained a hodgepodge of material, everything

from receipts for gas, food and office supplies to newspaper articles,
computer printouts and pages torn from magazines. This pile also contained
his tax filings, banking statements, and various invoices related to his
phone, internet, cable services, and car insurance. I wasn’t ready to go
through them, as I really didn’t know how they could help me at this point,
but they might offer up useful information once I figured out what Howard
was working on.

I also had a three-inch-high stack of pages I hadn’t been able to assign to

one of the other eleven piles I had already made. It was also possible one or
more pages might now be sitting in the wrong pile but, as a first cut, they
made sense where they were.

My cell phone rang, providing a welcomed distraction.

“Hi, Donna.”

“Hi, Jorja. I just wanted to let you know I got a call from the police this
morning. They found Dad’s car in the Heritage Park parking lot. The
driver’s window was smashed out and someone used a crowbar to pop the
trunk. The glove box was empty. I’ve found an autobody shop that will fix
the trunk and window on the car using used parts so it will keep the costs
down. They’re going to go pick it up.”

“Hmm, the police don’t think it odd that someone broke into his car and his
apartment after he was found dead?”

“I asked the same thing, but they said they see this kind of thing all the
time. The car was in a paid parking lot that gets locked overnight. The
culprits see these left-behind cars and know that no one will be coming for
them until morning.”

My previous job as a forensic lab analyst had honed my inclination to

consider risk and probability when examining evidence. I quickly
considered the probability of would-be thieves randomly breaking into a car
that was owned by someone who had died under somewhat unknown
circumstances, then had their apartment ransacked. A red flag popped up.

I refocused. Donna was still talking.

“There’s another reason I’m calling. The building manager from Dad’s
apartment called me just now. He wants the whole place cleaned out by the
end of the day tomorrow. He says he’s got a renter lined up and if I don’t
get the place cleaned by then, he’s going to hire cleaners to shampoo the
rugs, clean the oven and all that, and send me the bill.”

“Whoa. You can tell the old vulture to cool his jets. I’ve been going through
your father’s files, and I found his rental agreement in the mix. He’s paid up
until the end of the month—so that means you don’t have to give the
apartment back for two and half more weeks.”

“Oh, thank goodness.”

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respectabilities of his well-to-do uncles, and cousins, and aunts.
Goaded by hardship, and pathetically lured by the glamorous mirage
of distance, with all the impetuosity of his eighteen summers he
planned a hegira. “With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself
upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. This is my substitute for
pistol and ball.”
 CHAPTER IV
A SUBSTITUTE FOR PISTOL AND BALL

“When I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the

mast, plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the
royal mast-head. True, they rather order me about some,
and make me jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper
in a May meadow. And at first, this sort of thing is
unpleasant enough. It touches one’s sense of honour,
particularly if you come of an old established family in the
land, the Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes.
And more than all, if just previous to putting your hand
into the tar-pot, you have been lording it as a country
schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you,
the transition is a keen one, I assure you, from a
schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction
of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear
it.”
—Herman Melville: Moby-Dick.
When, at the age of seventeen, Melville cut loose from his mother,
his kind cousins and aunts, and sympathising sisters, he was stirred
by motives of desperation, and by the immature delusion that
happiness lies elusive and beckoning, just over the world’s rim. It
was a drastic escape from the intolerable monotony of prosaic
certainties and aching frustrations. “Sad disappointments in several
plans which I had sketched for my future life,” says Melville, “the
necessity of doing something for myself, united with a naturally
roving disposition, conspired within me, to send me to sea as a
sailor.”
In Redburn: His First Voyage. Being the Sailor-boy Confessions and
Reminiscences of the Son-of-a-Gentleman (1849) Melville has left
what is the only surviving record of his initial attempt “to sail beyond
the sunset.” Luridly vivid and exuberant was his imagination,
flooding the world of his childhood and fantastically transmuting
reality. At the time of his first voyage, Melville was, it is well to
remember, a boy of seventeen. He was not old enough, not wise
enough, to regard his dreams as impalpable projections of his
defeated desires: desires inflamed by what Dr. Johnson called the
“dangerous prevalence of imagination,” and which, in “sober
probability” could find no actual satisfaction. Had Melville been a
nature of less impetuosity, or of less abundant physical vitality, he
might have moped tamely at home and “yearned.” But with the
desperate Quixotic enterprise of a splendid but embittered boy, he
sallied forth into the unknown to put his dreams to the test. When it
was reported to Carlyle that Margaret Fuller made boast: “I accept
the universe,” unimpressed he remarked: “Gad! she’d better.”
Melville, when only seventeen, had not yet come to Carlyle’s
dyspeptic resignation to the cosmic order. “As years and dumps
increase; as reflection lends her solemn pause, then,” so Melville
says, in substance, in a passage on elderly whales, “in the impotent,
repentant, admonitory stage of life, do sulky old souls go about all
alone among the meridians and parallels saying their prayers.”
Lacking Dr. Johnson’s elderly wisdom, Melville believed there to be
some correlation between happiness and geography. He was not
willing to take resignation on faith. Not through “spontaneous
striving towards development,” but through necessity and hard
contact with nature and men does the recalcitrant dreamer accept
Carlyle’s dictum. With drastic experience, most men come at last to
have a little commonsense knocked into their heads,—and a good bit
of imagination knocked out, as Wordsworth, for one, discovered.
Melville’s recourse to the ocean in 1837, as that of Richard Henry
Dana’s three years before, was a heroic measure, calculated either
to take the nonsense out of both of them, or else to drive them
straight either to suicide, madness, or rum-soaked barbarism. To
both boys, it was a crucial test that would have ruined coarser or
weaker natures. Dana came from out the ordeal purged and
strengthened, toned up to the proper level, and no longer too fine
for everyday use. Though as years went by, so says C. F. Adams, his
biographer, “the freshness of the great lesson faded away, and
influences which antedated his birth and surrounded his life asserted
themselves, not for his good.”
Because of lack of contemporary evidence, the immediate influences
of Melville’s first experience in the forecastle, cannot be so positively
stated. Redburn, the only record of the adventure, was not written
until twelve years after Melville had experienced what it records.
Extraordinarily crowded was this intervening span of twelve years.
But despite the fulness of intervening experience—or, maybe,
because of it—the universe still stuck in his maw: it was a bolus on
which he gagged. Redburn is written in embittered memory of
Melville’s first hegira. In the words of Mr. H. S. Salt: “It is a record of
bitter experience and temporary disillusionment—the confessions of
a poor, proud youth, who goes to sea ‘with a devil in his heart’ and is
painfully initiated into the unforeseen hardships of a sea-faring life.”
In 1849 he was still unadjusted to unpalatable reality, and in
Redburn he seems intent upon revenging himself upon his early
disillusion by an inverted idealism,—by building for himself, “not
castles, but dungeons in Spain,”—as if, failing to reach the moon, he
should determine to make a Cynthia of the first green cheese. And
this inverted idealism he achieves most effectively by recording with
photographic literalness the most hideous details of his penurious
migration. His romantic realism—reminding one of Zola and certain
pages out of Rousseau—he alternates with malicious self-satire, and
its obverse gesture, obtrusive self-pity. To those austere and classical
souls who are proudly impatient of this style of writing, it must be
insisted with what Arnold called “damnable iteration” that Redburn
purports to be the confessions of a seventeen-year-old lad.
Autobiographically, the book is, of course, of superlative interest. But
despite its unaccountable neglect, and Melville’s ostentation of
contempt for it, it is none the less important, in the history of letters,
as a very notable achievement. Mr. Masefield and W. Clark Russell
alone, of competent critics, seem to have been aware of its
existence. It is Redburn that Mr. Masefield confesses to loving best
of Melville’s writings: this “boy’s book about running away to sea.”
Mr. Masefield thinks, however, that “one must know New York and
the haunted sailor-town of Liverpool to appreciate that gentle story
thoroughly.”
When Melville wrote Redburn in 1849, there was no book exactly like
it in our literature, its only possible forerunners being Nathaniel
Ames’ A Mariner’s Sketches (1830) and Dana’s Two Years before the
Mast (1840). The great captains had written of their voyages, it is
true; or when they themselves left no record, their literary laxity was
usually corrected by the querulousness of some member of their
ship’s company. Great compilations such as Churchill’s, or Harris’, or
Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and
Discoveries of the English Nation: made by sea or overland to the
remotest and farthest different quarters of the earth at any time
within the Compass of these 1600 years, or no less luxuriously
entitled works, such as the fine old eighteenth century folio of
Captain Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Lives and
Adventures of the Most Famous Highwaymen, Murderers, Street
Robbers, etc., To which is added, A Genuine Account of the Voyages
and Plunders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, interspersed with
several diverting tales, and pleasant songs, and adorned with the
Heads of the Most Remarkable Villains, curiously Engraven, are
monuments to the prodigious wealth of the early literature of sea
adventure. The light of romance colours these maritime exploits, and
even upon the maturest gaze there still lingers something of the
radiance with which the ardent imagination of boyhood gilds the
actions and persons of these fierce sea-warriors, treacherous, cruel
and profligate miscreants though the most picturesque of them
were.
But these hardy adventurers were men of action; men proud of their
own exploits, but untouched by any corrupt self-consciousness of
their Gilbert-and-Sullivan, or Byronic possibilities; men untempted to
offer any superfluous encouragement to the deep blue sea to “roll.”
And though many of them—Captain Cook, for example—ran away to
sea to ship before the mast, they in later years betray no temptings
to linger with attention over their days of early obscurity. Even The
Book of Things Forgotten passes over the period of Cook’s life in the
forecastle. He began as an apprentice, he ended as a mate. That is
all. As regards the life he led as a youth on board the merchant ship
there is no account: a silence that forces Walter Besant in his
Captain Cook to a page or two of surmise as a transition to more
notable sureties. An appreciation of the romance of the sea, and of
the humbler details of the life of the common sailor is one of our
most recent sophistications.
In fiction, it is true, Smollett had his sailors, as did Scott, and
Marryat, and Cooper,—to mention only the most notable names.
Provoked to originality by a defiant boast, Cooper wrote the earliest
first-rate sea-novel: a story concerning itself exclusively with the sea.
Remarkable is the clearness and accuracy of his description of the
manœuvres of his ships. He makes his vessels “walk the waters like
a thing of life.” “I have loved ships as I have loved men,” says
Melville. And Cooper before him, as Conrad after him, have by
similar love given personality to vessels. Among his company of able
seamen, Cooper has his Long Tom Coffin: and these are more
picturesque, and perhaps more real than his Lord Geoffrey
Cleveland, his Admiral Bluewater, his Griffith, and his other
quarterdeck people. But sea-life as Cooper knew it was sea-life as
seen from the quarterdeck, and from the quarterdeck of the United
States navy.
Marryat, it is true, makes his Newton Foster a merchant sailor. But
Marryat knew nothing of the hidden life of the merchant service. He
had passed his sea-life in the ships of the States, and he knew no
more of what passed in a merchantman’s forecastle than the general
present day land intelligence knows of what passes in a steamer’s
engine room. Dana and Melville were the first to lift the hatch and
show the world what passes in a ship’s forecastle. Dana disclosed
these secrets in a single volume; Melville in a number of remarkable
narratives, the first of which was Redburn.
Dana’s is a trustworthy and matter-of-fact account in the form of a
journal; a vigorous, faithful, modest narrative. With very little
interest exhibited in the feeling of his own pulse, he recounts the
happenings aboard the ship from day to day. Melville’s account is
more vivid because more intimate. As is the case with George
Borrow, his eye is always riveted upon himself. He minutely amplifies
his own emotions and sensations, and with an incalculable gain over
Dana in descriptive vividness. One would have to be colour blind to
purple patches to fail to recognise in Redburn streaks of the purest
Tyrean dye. Between Melville and Dana the answer is obvious as to
“who fished the murex up?”
“It was with a heavy heart and full eyes,” says Melville, “that my
mother parted from me; perhaps she thought me an erring and a
wilful boy, and perhaps I was; but if I was, it had been a hard-
hearted world, and hard times that had made me so.”
Dressed in a hunting jacket; one leg of his trousers adorned with an
ample and embarrassing patch; armed with a fowling piece which
his older brother Gansevoort had given him, in lieu of cash, to sell in
New York; without a penny in his pocket: Melville arrived in New
York on a fine rainy day in the late spring of 1837. Dripping like a
seal, and garbed like a housebreaker, he walked across town to the
home of a friend of Gansevoort’s, where he was dried, warmed and
fed.
Philo of Judea has descended to posterity blushing because he had a
body. Melville survives, rosy in animality: but his was never Philo’s
scarlet of shame. Melville was a boy of superb physical vigour: and
his blackest plunges of discouragement and philosophical despair
were always wholesomely amenable to the persuasions of food and
drink. It was Carlyle’s conviction that with stupidity and a good
digestion man can bear much: had Melville been gifted with
stupidity, he would have needed only regular meals to convert him
into a miracle of cheerful endurance. “There is a savour of life and
immortality in substantial fare,” he later wrote; “we are like balloons,
which are nothing till filled.” When Melville sat down to the well-
stocked table at his friend’s house in New York he was a very
miserable boy. But his misery was not invulnerable. “Every mouthful
pushed the devil that had been tormenting me all day farther and
farther out of me, till at last I entirely ejected him with three
successive bowls of Bohea. That night I went to bed thinking the
world pretty tolerable after all.”
Next day, accompanied by his brother’s friend, whose true name
Melville disguises under the anonymity of Jones, Melville walked
down to the water front.
At that time, and indeed until as recently as thirty years ago, the
water front of a great sea-port town like New York showed a
towering forest of tall and tapering masts reaching high up above
the roofs of the water-side buildings, crossed with slender spars
hung with snowy canvas, and braced with a maze of cordage: a
brave sight that Melville passes over in morose silence. He
postpones until his arrival in Liverpool the spicing of his account with
the blended smells of pitch, and tar, and old-ropes, and wet-wood,
and resin and the sharp cool tang of brine. Nor does Melville pause
to conjure up the great bowsprits and jib-booms that stretched
across the street that passed the foot of the slips. Though Melville
has left a detailed description of the Liverpool docks—not failing to
paint in with a dripping brush the blackest shadows of the low life
framing that picturesque scene—it was outside his purpose to give
any hint of the maritime achievement of the merchant service in
which he was such an insignificant unit.
The maritime achievement of the United States was then almost at
the pinnacle of its glory. At that time, the topsails of the United
States flecked every ocean, and their captains courageous left no
lands unvisited, no sea unexplored. From New England in particular
sailed ships where no other ships dared to go, anchoring where no
one else ever dreamed of looking for trade. And so it happened, as
Ralph D. Paine in his The Old Merchant Marine has pointed out, that
“in the spicy warehouses that overlooked Salem Harbour there came
to be stored hemp from Luzon, gum copal from Zanzibar, palm oil
from Africa, coffee from Arabia, tallow from Madagascar, whale oil
from the Antarctic, hides and wool from the Rio de la Plata, nutmeg
and cloves from Malaysia.” With New England originality and
audacity, Boston shipped cargoes of ice to Calcutta. And for thirty
years a regular trade in Massachusetts ice remained active and
lucrative: such perishable freight out upon a four or five months’
voyage across the fiery Equator, doubling Da Gama’s cape and
steering through the furnace heat of the Indian Ocean. In those
days the people of the Atlantic seacoast from Maryland northward
found their interests vitally allied with maritime adventure. There
was a generous scattering of sea-faring folk among Melville’s
forebears of our early national era; and Melville’s father, an importing
merchant, owed his fortunes in important part, to the chances of the
sea. The United States, without railroads, and with only the most
wretched excuses for post-roads, were linked together by coasting
ships. And thousands of miles of ocean separated Americans from
the markets in which they must sell their produce and buy their
luxuries. Down to the middle of the last century, one of the most
vital interests of the United States was in the sea: an interest that
deeply influenced the thought, the legislature and the literature of
our people. And during this period, as Willis J. Abbott, in his
American Merchant Ships and Sailors has noted, “the sea was a
favourite career, not only for American boys with their way to make
in the world, but for the sons of wealthy men as well. That classic of
New England seamanship Two Years Before the Mast was not written
until the middle of the 19th century, and its author went to sea, not
in search of wealth, but of health. But before the time of Richard
Henry Dana, many a young man of good family and education—a
Harvard graduate, like him, perhaps—bade farewell to a home of
comfort and refinement and made his berth in a smoky, fetid
forecastle to learn the sailor’s calling. There was at that time less to
engage the activities and arouse the ambitions of youth than now,
and the sea offered a most promising career.... Ships were
multiplying fast, and no really lively and alert seaman need stay long
in the forecastle.” The brilliant maritime growth of the United States,
after a steady development for two hundred years, was, when
Melville sailed in 1837, within twenty-five years of its climax. It was
to reach its peak in 1861, when the aggregate tonnage belonging to
the United States was but a little smaller than that of Great Britain
and her dependencies, and nearly as large as the combined tonnage
of all other nations of the world, Great Britain excepted. Vanished
fleets and brave memories—a chronicle of America which had
written its closing chapters before the Civil War!
But this state of affairs,—if, indeed, he was even vaguely conscious
of its existence,—left Melville at the time of his first shipping,
completely cold. It is doubtless true that Maria would have respected
him more if he had attempted to justify his sea-going by assuring
her that at that time it was to no degree remarkable for seamen to
become full-fledged captains and part owners at the age of twenty-
one, or even earlier. And Maria would have listened impressed to
such cogent evidence as the case of Thomas T. Forbes, for example,
who shipped before the mast at the age of thirteen, and was
commander of the Levant at twenty; or the case of William Sturges,
afterwards the head of a firm which at one time controlled half the
trade between the United States and China, who shipped at
seventeen, and was a captain and manager in the China trade at
nineteen. But such facts touched Melville not at all. “At that early
age,” he says, “I was as unambitious as a man of sixty.” Melville’s
brother, Tom, came to be a sea-captain. Melville’s was a different
destiny.
So he trudged with his friend among the boats along the water
front, where, after some little searching, they hit upon a ship for
Liverpool. In the cabin they found the suave and bearded Captain,
dapperly dressed, and humming a brisk air as he promenaded up
and down: not such a completely odious creature, despite Melville’s
final contempt for him. The conversation was concluded by Melville
signing up as a “boy,” at terms not wildly lucrative for Melville.
“Pray, captain,” said Melville’s amiable bungling friend, “how much
do you generally pay a handsome fellow like this?”
“Well,” said the captain, looking grave and profound, “we are not so
particular about beauty, and we never give more than three dollars
to a green lad.”
Melville’s next move was to sell his gun: an experience which gives
him occasion to discourse on pawn shops and the unenviable
hardships of paupers. With the two and a half dollars that he reaped
by the sale of his gun, and in almost criminal innocence of the outfit
he would need, he bought a red woollen shirt, a tarpaulin hat, a
belt, and a jack-knife. In his improvidence, he was ill provided,
indeed, with everything calculated to make his situation aboard ship
at all comfortable, or even tolerable. He was without mattress or
bed-clothes, or table-tools; without pilot-cloth jackets, or trousers, or
guernsey frocks, or oil-skin suits, or sea-boots and the other things
which old seamen used to carry in their chests. As he himself says,
his sea-outfit was “something like that of the Texan rangers, whose
uniform, they say, consists of a shirt collar and a pair of spurs.” His
purchases made, he did a highly typical thing: “I had only one penny
left, so I walked out to the end of the pier, and threw the penny into
the water.”
That night, after dinner, Melville went to his room to try on his red
woollen shirt before the glass, to see what sort of a looking sailor he
would make. But before beginning this ritual before the mirror, he
“locked the door carefully, and hung a towel over the knob, so that
no one could peep through the keyhole.” It is said that throughout
his life Melville clung to this practice of draping door-knobs. “As soon
as I got into the shirt,” Melville goes on to say, “I began to feel sort
of warm and red about the face, which I found was owing to the
reflection of the dyed wool upon my skin. After that, I took a pair of
scissors and went to cutting my hair, which was very long. I thought
every little would help in making me a light hand to run aloft.”
Next morning, before he reached the ship, it began raining hard, so
it was plain there would be no getting to sea that day. But having
once said farewell to his friends, and feeling a repetition of the
ceremony would be awkward, Melville boarded the ship, where a
large man in a large dripping pea-jacket, who was calking down the
main-hatches, directed him in no cordial terms to the forecastle.
Rather different was Dana’s appearance on board the brig Pilgrim on
August 14, 1834, “in full sea-rig, with my chest containing an outfit
for a two or three years’ voyage.” Nor did Dana begin in the
forecastle.
In the dark damp stench of that deserted hole, Melville selected an
empty bunk. In the middle of this he deposited the slim bundle of
his belongings, and penniless and dripping spent the day walking
hungry among the wharves: a day’s peregrination that he recounts
with vivid and remorseless realism.
At night he returned to the forecastle, where he met a thick-headed
lad from Lancaster of about his own years. Glad of any
companionship, Melville and this lubber boy crawled together in the
same bunk. But between the high odour of the forecastle, the loud
snoring of his bed-fellow, wet, cold and hungry, he went up on deck,
where he walked till morning. When the groceries on the wharf
opened, he went to make a breakfast of a glass of water. This made
him qualmish. “My head was dizzy, and I went staggering along the
walk, almost blind.”
By the time Melville got back to the ship, everything was in an
uproar. The pea-jacket man was there ordering about men in the
riggings, and people were bringing off chickens, and pigs, and beef,
and vegetables from the shore. Melville’s initial task was the cleaning
out of the pig-pen; after this he was sent up the top-mast with a
bucket of a thick lobbered gravy, which slush he dabbed over the
mast. This over, and, in the increasing bustle everything having been
made ready to sail, the word was passed to go to dinner fore and
aft. “Though the sailors surfeited with eating and drinking ashore did
not touch the salt beef and potatoes which the black cook handed
down into the forecastle: and though this left the whole allowance to
me; to my surprise, I found that I could eat little or nothing; for now
I only felt deadly faint, but not hungry.”
Only a lunatic, of course, would expect to find very commodious or
airy quarters, any drawing-room amenities, Chautauqua uplift, or
Y.M.C.A. insipidities aboard a merchantman of the old sailing days.
Nathaniel Ames, a Harvard graduate who a little before Melville’s
time shipped before the mast, records that on his first vessel, men
seeking berths in the forecastle were ordered to bring certificates of
good character from their clergymen: an unusual requirement,
surely. In more than one memoir, there is mention of a “religious
ship”: an occasional mention that speaks volumes for the
heathenism of the majority. Dana says of one of the mates aboard
the Pilgrim: “He was too easy and amiable for the mate of a
merchantman. He was not the man to call a sailor a ‘son of a bitch’
and knock him down with a hand-spike.” And J. Grey Jewell,
sometime United States Consul at Singapore, in his book Among Our
Sailors makes a sober and elaborately documented attempt to strip
the life of a sailor of its romantic glamour, to show that it is not a
“round of fun and frolic and jollity with the advantages of seeing
many distant lands and people thrown in”: an effort that would seem
to be unnecessary except to boy readers of Captain Marryat and
dime thrillers.
Melville’s shipmates were, it goes without saying, rough and illiterate
men. With typical irony, he says that with a good degree of
complacency and satisfaction he compared his own character with
that of his shipmates: “for I had previously associated with persons
of a very discreet life, so that there was little opportunity to magnify
myself by comparing myself with my neighbours.” In a more serious
mood, he says of sailors as a class: “the very fact of their being
sailors argues a certain restlessness and sensualism of character,
ignorance, and depravity. They are deemed almost the refuse of the
earth; and the romantic view of them is principally had through
romances.” And their chances of improvement are not increased, he
contends, by the fact that “after the vigorous discipline, hardships,
dangers and privations of a voyage, they are set adrift in a foreign
port, and exposed to a thousand enticements, which, under the
circumstances, would be hard even for virtue to withstand, unless
virtue went about on crutches.” It was a tradition for centuries
fostered in the naval service that the sailor was a dog, a different
human species from the landsman, without laws and usages to
protect him. This tradition survived among merchant sailors as an
unhappy anachronism even into the twentieth century, when an
American Congress was reluctant to bestow upon seamen the
decencies of existence enjoyed by the poorest labourer ashore.
Melville’s shipmates did not promise to be men of the calibre of
which Maria Gansevoort would have approved.
With his ship, the Highlander, streaming out through the Narrows,
past sights rich in association to his boyish recollection; streaming
out and away from all familiar smells and sights and sounds, Melville
found himself “a sort of Ishmael in the ship, without a single friend
or companion, and I began to feel a hatred growing up in me
against the whole crew.” In other words, Melville was a very
homesick boy. But he blended common sense with homesickness.
“My heart was like lead, and I felt bad enough, Heaven knows; but I
soon learnt that sailors breathe nothing about such things, but strive
their best to appear all alive and hearty.” And circumstances helped
him live up to this gallant insight. For, as he says, “there was plenty
of work to be done, which kept my thoughts from becoming too
much for me.”
Melville was a boy of stout physical courage, game to the marrow,
and in texture of muscle and bone a worthy grandson of General
Gansevoort. What would have ruined a sallow constitution, he seems
to have thriven upon. “Being so illy provided with clothes,” he says,
“I frequently turned into my bunk soaking wet, and turned out again
piping hot and smoking like a roasted sirloin, and yet was never the
worse for it; for then, I bore a charmed life of youth and health, and
was daggerproof to bodily ill.” With alacrity and good sportsmanship,
he went at his duties. Before he had been out many days, he had
outlived the acute and combined miseries of homesickness and
seasickness; the colour was back in his cheeks, he is careful to
observe with Miltonic vanity. Soon he was taking especial delight in
furling the top-gallant sails and royals in a hard wind, and in hopping
about in the riggings like a Saint Jago’s monkey. “There was a wild
delirium about it,” he says, “a fine rushing of the blood about the
heart; and a glad thrilling and throbbing of the whole system, to find
yourself tossed up at every pitch into the clouds of a stormy sky, and
hovering like a judgment angel between heaven and earth; both
hands free, with one foot in the rigging, and one somewhere behind
you in the wind.”
The food, of course, was neither dainty nor widely varied: an
unceasing round of salt-pork, stale beef, “duff,” “lobscouse,” and
coffee. “The thing they called coffee,” says Melville with keen
descriptive effort, “was the most curious tasting drink I ever drank,
and tasted as little like coffee as it did like lemonade; though, to be
sure, it was generally as cold as lemonade. But what was more
curious still, was the different quality and taste of it on different
mornings. Sometimes it tasted fishy, as if it were a decoction of
Dutch herring; and then it would taste very salt, as if some old horse
or sea-beef had been boiled in it; and then again it would taste a
sort of cheesy, as if the captain had sent his cheese-parings forward
to make our coffee of; and yet another time it would have such a
very bad flavour that I was almost ready to think some old stocking
heel had been boiled in it. Notwithstanding the disagreeableness of
the flavour, I always used to have a strange curiosity every morning
to see what new taste it was going to have; and I never missed
making a new discovery and adding another taste to my palate.”
Withal, Melville might have fared much worse, as contemporaneous
accounts more than adequately prove. Even in later days, Frank T.
Bullen was able to write: “I have often seen the men break up a
couple of biscuits into a pot of coffee for breakfast, and after letting
it stand for a minute or two, skim off the accumulated scum of
vermin from the top—maggots, weevils, etc., to the extent of a
couple of tablespoonsful, before they could shovel the mess into
their craving stomachs.” Melville never complains of maggots or
weevils in his biscuits, nor does he complain of being stinted food;
during this period, both common enough complaints. The cook, it is
true, did not sterilise everything he touched. “I never saw him wash
but once,” says Melville, “and that was at one of his own soup pots
one dark night when he thought no one saw him.” But as has
already been imputed to Melville for righteousness, his was not a
squeamish stomach, and despite the usual amount of filth on board
the Highlander, his meals seem to have gone off easily enough. He
has left this pleasant picture of the amenities of food-taking: “the
sailors sitting cross-legged at their chests in a circle, and breaking
the hard biscuit, very sociably, over each other’s heads, which was
very convenient, indeed, but gave me the headache, at least for the
first four or five days till I got used to it; and then I did not care
much about it, only it kept my hair full of crumbs; and I had forgot
to bring a fine comb and brush, so I used to shake my hair out to
windward over the bulwarks every evening.”
Though the forecastle was, to characterise it quietly, a cramped and
fetid hole, dimly lighted and high in odour, Melville came to be
sufficiently acclimated to it to enjoy lying on his back in his bunk
during a forenoon watch below, reading while his messmates slept.
His bunk was an upper one, and right under the head of it was a
bull’s-eye, inserted into the deck to give light. Here he read an
account of Shipwrecks and Disasters at Sea, and a large black
volume on Delirium Tremens: Melville’s share in the effects of a
sailor whose bunk he occupied, who had, in a frenzy of
drunkenness, hurled himself overboard. Here Melville also struggled
to read Smith’s Wealth of Nations. “But soon I gave it up for lost
work,” says Melville; “and thought that the old backgammon board
we had at home, lettered on the back The History of Rome, was
quite as full of matter, and a great deal more entertaining.”
The forecastle, however, was not invariably the setting for scenes so
idyllic. Drunkenness there was aplenty, especially at the beginning of
the voyage both from New York and from Liverpool. Of the three
new men shipped at Liverpool, two were so drunk they were unable
to engage in their duties until some hours after the boat quit the
pier; but the third, down on the ship’s papers as Miguel Saveda, had
to be carried in by a crimp and slung into a bunk where he lay
locked in a trance. To heighten the discomforts of the forecastle,
there was soon added to the stench of sweated flesh, old clothes,
tobacco smoke, rum and bilge, a new odour, attributed to the
presence of a dead rat. Some days before, the forecastle had been
smoked out to extirpate the vermin over-running her: a smoking that
seemed to have been fatal to a rodent among the hollow spaces in
the side planks. “At midnight, the larboard watch, to which I
belonged, turned out; and instantly as every man waked, he
exclaimed at the now intolerable smell, supposed to be heightened
by the shaking up of the bilge-water, from the ship’s rolling.
“‘Blast that rat!’ cried the Greenlander.
“‘He’s blasted already,’ said Jackson, who in his drawers had crossed
over to the bunk of Miguel. ‘It’s a water-rat, shipmates, that’s dead;
and here he is’—and with that he dragged forth the sailor’s arm,
exclaiming ‘Dead as a timber-head!’
“Upon this the men rushed toward the bunk, Max with the light,
which he held to the man’s face. ‘No, he’s not dead,’ he cried, as the
yellow flame wavered for a moment at the seaman’s motionless
mouth. But hardly had the words escaped when, to the silent horror
of all, two threads of greenish fire, like a forked tongue, darted out
between his lips; and in a moment the cadaverous face was crawled
over by a swarm of worm-like flames.
“The light dropped from the hand of Max, and went out; while
covered all over with spires and sparkles of flame, that faintly
crackled in the silence, the uncovered parts of the body burned
before us, precisely like a phosphorescent shark in a midnight sea.
The eyes were open and fixed; the mouth was curled like a scroll,
while the whole face, now wound in curls of soft blue flame, wore an
aspect of grim defiance, and eternal death. Prometheus blasted by
fire on the rock.
“One arm, its red shirt-sleeve rolled up, exposed the man’s name,
tattooed in vermilion, near the hollow of the middle joint; and as if
there was something peculiar in the painted flesh, every vibrating
letter burned so white that you might read the flaming name in the
flickering ground of blue.
“‘Where’s that damned Miguel?’ was now shouted down among us
by the mate.
“‘He’s gone to the harbour where they never weigh anchor,’ coughed
Jackson. ‘Come down, sir, and look.’
“Thinking that Jackson intended to beard him, the mate sprang
down in a rage; but recoiled at the burning body as if he had been
shot by a bullet. ‘Take hold of it,’ said Jackson at last, to the
Greenlander; ‘it must go overboard. Don’t stand shaking there, like a
dog; take hold of it, I say!—But stop!’ and smothering it all in the
blankets, he pulled it partly out of the bunk.
“A few minutes more, and it fell with a bubble among the
phosphorescent sparkles of the sea, leaving a coruscating wake as it
sank.”
After this, Melville ceased reading in the forecastle. And indeed no
other sailor but Jackson would stay in the forecastle alone, and none
would laugh or sing there: none but Jackson. But he, while the rest
would be sitting silently smoking on their chests, or on their bunks,
would look towards the nailed-up bunk of Miguel and cough, and
laugh, and invoke the dead man with scoffs and jeers.
Of Melville’s shipmates, surely this Jackson was the most
remarkable: a fit rival to Conrad’s Nigger of the Narcissus. Max and
the Greenlander were merely typical old tars. Mr. Thompson, the
grave negro cook, with his leaning towards metaphysics and his
disquisitions on original sin, together with his old crony, Lavendar
the steward, with his amorous backslidings, his cologne water, and
his brimstone pantaloons, though mildly diverting, were usual
enough. Blunt, too, with his collection of hair-oils, and his dream-
book, and his flowing bumpers of horse-salts, though picturesque,
was pale in comparison with Jackson. Larry, the old whaler, with his
sentimental distaste for civilised society, was a forerunner of Mr. H.
L. Mencken; and as such, deserves a more prominent mention. “And
what’s the use of bein’ snivelized?” he asks Melville; “snivelized
chaps only learn the way to take on ’bout life, and snivel. Blast
Ameriky, I say. I tell ye, ye wouldn’t have been to sea here, leadin’
this dog’s life, if you hadn’t been snivelized. Snivelization has been
the ruin on ye; and it’s sp’iled me complete: I might have been a
great man in Madagasky; it’s too darned bad! Blast Ameriky, I say.”
But flat, stale and unprofitable seem the whole ship’s company in
comparison with the demoniacal Jackson. Sainte-Beuve, in reviewing
an early work of Cooper’s, speaks enthusiastically of Cooper’s
“faculté créatrice qui enfante et met au monde des caractères
nouveaux, et en vertu de laquelle Rabelais a produit ‘Panurge,’ Le
Sage ‘Gil Blas,’ et Richardson ‘Clarissa.’” In The Confidence Man
Melville spends a chapter discussing “originality” in literature. The
phrase “quite an original” he maintains, in contempt of Sainte-
Beuve, is “a phrase, we fancy, oftener used by the young, or the
unlearned, or the untravelled, than by the old, or the well-read, or
the man who has made the grand tour.” This faculty of creating
“originals”—which is, after all, as both Melville and Flaubert clearly
saw, but a quality of observation—Melville had to an unusual degree.
In this incongruous group of striking “originals” Jackson deserves, as
Melville says, a “lofty gallows.”
“Though Tiberius come in the succession of the Cæsars, and though
unmatchable Tacitus has embalmed his carrion,” writes Melville in
the luxurious cadence of Sir Thomas Browne which some of his
critics have stigmatised as both the sign and cause of his later
“madness,” “yet do I account this Yankee Jackson full as dignified a
personage as he, and as well meriting his lofty gallows in history,
even though he was a nameless vagabond without an epitaph, and
none but I narrate what he was. For there is no dignity in
wickedness, whether in purple or rags: and hell is a democracy of
devils, where all are equals. In historically canonising on earth the
condemned below, and lifting up and lauding the illustrious damned,
we do but make ensamples of wickedness; and call upon ambition to
do some great iniquity to be sure of fame.”
When Melville came to know Jackson, nothing was left of him but
the foul lees and dregs of a man; a walking skeleton encased in a
skin as yellow as gamboge, branded with the marks of a fearful end
near at hand: “like that of King Antiochus of Syria, who died a worse
death, history says, than if he had been stung out of the world by
wasps and hornets.” In appearance he suggests Villon at the time
when the gallows spared him the death-penalty of his vices. He
looked like a man with his hair shaved off and just recovering from
the yellow fever. His hair had fallen out; his nose was broken in the
middle; he squinted in one eye. But to Melville that squinting eye
“was the most deep, subtle, infernal-looking eye that I ever saw
lodged in a human head. I believe that by good rights it must have
belonged to a wolf, or starved tiger; at any rate I would defy any
oculist to turn out a glass eye half so cold and snaky and deadly.” He
was a foul-mouthed bully, and “being the best seaman on board,
and very overbearing every way, all the men were afraid of him, and
durst not contradict him or cross his path in anything.” And what
made this more remarkable was, that he was the weakest man,
bodily, of the whole crew. “But he had such an over-awing way with
him; such a deal of brass and impudence, such an unflinching face,
and withal was such a hideous mortal, that Satan himself would
have run from him.” The whole crew stood in mortal fear of him, and
cringed and fawned before him like so many spaniels. They would
rub his back after he was undressed and lying in his bunk, and run
up on deck to the cook-house to warm some cold coffee for him, and
fill his pipe, and give him chews of tobacco, and mend his jackets
and trousers, and watch and tend and nurse him every way. “And all
the time he would sit scowling on them, and found fault with what
they did: and I noticed that those who did the most for him were the
ones he most abused.” These he flouted and jeered and laughed to
scorn, on occasion breaking out in such a rage that “his lips glued
together at the corners with a fine white foam.”
His age it was impossible to tell: for he had no beard, and no
wrinkles except for small crow’s-feet about the eyes. He might have
been thirty, or perhaps fifty years. “But according to his own
account, he had been at sea ever since he was eight years old, when
he first went to sea as a cabin-boy in an Indiaman, and ran away at
Calcutta.” And according to his own account, too, he had passed
through every kind of dissipation and abandonment in the worst
parts of the world. He had served in Portuguese slavers on the coast
of Africa, and with diabolical relish would tell of the middle passage
where the slaves were stowed, heel and point, like logs, and the
suffocated and dead were unmanacled and weeded out from the
living each morning before washing down the decks. Though he was
apt to be dumb at times, and would sit with “his eyes fixed, and his
teeth set, like a man in the moody madness,” yet when he did speak
his whole talk was full of piracies, plagues, poisonings, seasoned
with filth and blasphemy. “Though he never attended churches and
knew nothing of Christianity; no more than a Malay pirate; and
though he could not read a word, yet he was spontaneously an
atheist and an infidel; and during the long night watches, would
enter into arguments to prove that there was nothing to be believed;
nothing to be loved, and nothing worth living for; but everything to
be hated in the wide world. He was a Cain afloat; branded on his
yellow brow with some inscrutable curse; and going about
corrupting and searing every heart that beat near him.”
The last scene in his eventful history took place off Cape Cod, when,
in a stiff favourable breeze, the captain was impatient to make his
port before a shift of wind. Four sullen weeks previous to this had
Jackson spent in the forecastle without touching a rope. Every day
since leaving New York Jackson had seemed to be growing worse
and worse, both in body and mind. “And all the time, though his face
grew thinner and thinner, his eyes seemed to kindle more and more,
as if he were going to die out at last, and leave them burning like
tapers before his corpse.” When, after these four weeks of idleness,
Jackson, to the surprise of the crew, came up on deck, his aspect
was damp and death-like; the blue hollows of his eyes were like
vaults full of snakes; and issuing so unexpectedly from his dark tomb
in the forecastle, he looked like a man raised from the dead.
“Before the sailors had made fast the reef-tackle, Jackson was
tottering up the rigging; thus getting the start of them, and securing
his place at the extreme weather-end of the topsail yard—which in
reefing is accounted the place of honour. For it was one of the
characteristics of this man that though when on duty he would shy
away from mere dull work in a calm, yet in tempest time he always
claimed the van and would yield to none.
“Soon we were all strung along the main-topsail yard; the ship
rearing and plunging under us like a runaway steed; each man
griping his reef-point, and sideways leaning, dragging the sail over
towards Jackson, whose business it was to confine the reef corner to
the yard.
“His hat and shoes were off; and he rode the yard-arm end, leaning
backward to the gale, and pulling at the earing-rope like a bridle. At
all times, this is a moment of frantic exertion with sailors, whose
spirits seem then to partake of the commotion of the elements as
they hang in the gale between heaven and earth; and then it is, too,
that they are the most profane.
“‘Haul out to windward!’ coughed Jackson, with a blasphemous cry,
and he threw himself back with a violent strain upon the bridle in his
hand. But the wild words were hardly out of his mouth when his
hands dropped to his side, and the bellying sail was spattered with a
torrent of blood from his lungs.
“As the man next him stretched out his arm to save, Jackson fell
headlong from the yard, and with a long seethe, plunged like a diver
into the sea.
“It was when the ship had rolled to windward, which, with the long
projection of the yard-arm over the side, made him strike far out
upon the water. His fall was seen by the whole upward-gazing crowd
on deck, some of whom were spotted with the blood that trickled
from the sail, while they raised a spontaneous cry, so shrill and wild
that a blind man might have known something deadly had
happened.
“Clutching our reef-joints, we hung over the stick, and gazed down
to the one white bubbling spot which had closed over the head of
our shipmate; but the next minute it was brewed into the common
yeast of the waves, and Jackson never arose. We waited a few
minutes, expecting an order to descend, haul back the fore-yard,
and man the boats; but instead of that, the next sound that greeted
us was, ‘Bear a hand and reef away, men!’ from the mate.”
 CHAPTER V
DISCOVERIES ON TWO CONTINENTS

“If you read of St. Peter’s, they say, and then go and visit
it, ten to one, you account it a dwarf compared to your
high-raised ideal. And, doubtless, Jonah himself must have
been much disappointed when he looked up to the domed
midriff surmounting the whale’s belly, and surveyed the
ribbed pillars around him. A pretty large belly, to be sure,
thought he, but not so big as it might have been.”
—Herman Melville: Redburn.
The merchantman on which Melville shipped was not a Liverpool
liner, or packet-ship, plying in connection with a sisterhood of
packets. She was a regular trader to Liverpool; sailing upon no fixed
days, and acting very much as she pleased, being bound by no
obligation of any kind, though in all her voyages ever having New
York or Liverpool for her destination. Melville’s craft was not a
greyhound, not a very fast sailer. The swifter of the packet ships
then made the passage in fifteen or sixteen days; the Highlander,
travelling at a more matronly pace, was out on the Atlantic a
leisurely month.
“It was very early in the month of June that we sailed,” says Melville;
“and I had greatly rejoiced that it was that time of year; for it would
be warm and pleasant upon the ocean I thought; and my voyage
would be like a summer excursion to the seashore for the benefit of
the salt water, and a change of scene and society.” But the fact was
not identical with Melville’s fancy, and before many days at sea, he
found it a galling mockery to remember that his sisters had promised
to tell all enquiring friends that he had gone “abroad”: “just as if I
was visiting Europe on a tour with my tutor.” Though his thirty days
at sea considerably disabused him—for the time—of the unmitigated
delights of ocean travel in the forecastle; still always in the vague
and retreating distance did he hold to the promise of some
stupendous discovery still in store. Finally, one morning when he
came on deck, he was thrilled to discover that he was, in sober fact,
within sight of a foreign land: a shore-line that in imagination he
transformed into the seacoast of Bohemia. “A foreign country
actually visible!” But as he gazed ashore, disillusion ran hot upon the
heels of his romantic expectations.
“Was that Ireland? Why, there was nothing remarkable about that;
nothing startling. If that’s the way a foreign country looks, I might as
well have stayed at home. Now what, exactly, I had fancied the
shore would look like, I can not say; but I had a vague idea that it
would be something strange and wonderful.”
The next land they sighted was Wales. “It was high noon, and a long
line of purple mountains lay like a bank of clouds against the east.
But, after all, the general effect of these mountains was mortifyingly
like the general effect of the Kaatskill Mountains on the Hudson
River.”
It was not until midnight of the third day that they arrived at the
mouth of the Mersey. Before the following daybreak they took the
first flood.
“Presently, in the misty twilight, we passed immense buoys, and
caught sight of distant objects on shore, vague and shadowy
shapes, like Ossian’s ghosts.” And then it was that Melville found
leisure to lean over the side, “trying to summon up some image of
Liverpool, to see how the reality would answer to my concept.”
As the day advanced, the river contracted, and in the clear morning
Melville got his first sharp impression of a foreign port.
“I beheld lofty ranges of dingy ware-houses, which seemed very
deficient in the elements of the marvellous; and bore a most
unexpected resemblance to the ware-houses along South Street in
New York. There was nothing strange, nothing extraordinary about
them. There they stood; a row of calm and collected ware-houses;
very good and substantial edifices, doubtless, and admirably adapted
to the ends had in view by the builders: but yet, these edifices, I
must confess, were a sad and bitter disappointment to me.”
Melville was six weeks in Liverpool. Of this part of his adventure, he
says in Redburn: “I do not mean to present a diary of my stay there.
I shall here simply record the general tenor of the life led by our
crew during that interval; and will proceed to note down, at random,
my own wanderings about town, and impressions of things as they
are recalled to me now after the lapse of so many (twelve) years.”
Not the least important detail of these six weeks is the fact that
Melville and his ship-mates were very well fed at the sign of the
Baltimore Clipper. “The roast beef of Old England abounded; and so
did the immortal plum-puddings and the unspeakably capital
gooseberry pies.” Owing to the strict but necessary regulations of
the Liverpool docks, no fire of any kind was allowed on board the
vessels within them. And hence, though the sailors of the Highlander
slept in the forecastle, they were fed ashore at the expense of the
ship’s owners. This, in a large crew remaining at Liverpool more than
six weeks, as the Highlander did, formed no inconsiderable item in
the expenses of the voyage. The Baltimore Clipper was one of the
boarding houses near the docks which flourished on the appetite of
sailors. At the Baltimore Clipper was fed not only the crew of the
Highlander, but, each in a separate apartment, a variety of other
crews as well. Since each crew was known collectively by the name
of its ship, the shouts of the servant girls running about at dinner
time mustering their guests must have been alarming to an
uninitiated visitor.
“Where are the Empresses of China?—Here’s their beef been
smoking this half-hour”—“Fly, Betty, my dear, here come the
Panthers”—“Run, Molly, my love; get the salt-cellars for the
Splendids”—“You, Peggy, where’s the Siddons’ pickle-pot?”—“I say,
Judy, are you never coming with that pudding for the Sultans?”
It was to the Baltimore Clipper that Jackson immediately led the
ship’s crew when they first sprang ashore: up this street and down
that till at last he brought them to their destination in a narrow lane
filled with boarding-houses, spirit-vaults and sailors. While Melville’s
shipmates were engaged in tippling and talking with numerous old
acquaintances of theirs in the neighbourhood who thronged about
the door, he sat alone in the dining-room appropriated to the
Highlanders “meditating upon the fact that I was now seated upon
an English bench, under an English roof, in an English tavern,
forming an integral part of the British empire.”
Melville examined the place attentively. “It was a long narrow little
room, with one small arched window with red curtains, looking out
upon a smoky, untidy yard, bounded by a dingy brick wall, the top of
which was horrible with pieces of broken old bottles stuck into
mortar. A dull lamp swung overhead, placed in a wooden ship
suspended from the ceiling. The walls were covered with a paper,
representing an endless succession of vessels of all nations
continually circumnavigating the apartment. From the street came a
confused uproar of ballad-singers, bawling women, babies, and
drunken sailors.”
It was during this disenchanting examination that the realisation
began to creep chillingly over Melville that his prospect of seeing the
world as a sailor was, after all, but very doubtful. It seems never to
have struck him before that sailors but hover about the edges of
terra-firma; that “they land only upon wharves and pier-heads, and
their reminiscences of travel are only a dim recollection of a chain of
tap-rooms surrounding the globe.”
Melville’s six weeks in Liverpool offered him, however, opportunity to
make slightly more extended observations. During these weeks he
was free to go where he pleased between four o’clock in the
afternoon and the following dawn. Sundays he had entirely at his
own disposal. But withal, it was an excessively limited and distorted
version of England that was open for his examination. Except for his
shipmates, his very distant cousin, the Earl of Leven and Melville and
Queen Victoria and such like notables, he knew by name no living
soul in the British Isles. And neither his companions in the
forecastle, nor the remote and elaborately titled strangers of Melville
House, offered encouragement of an easy and glowing intimacy.
With but three dollars as his net capital—money advanced him in
Liverpool by the ship—and without a thread of presentable clothing
on his back, he could not hope promiscuously to ingratiate himself
either by his purse or the adornments of his person. Thus lacking in
the fundamentals of friendship, his native charms stood him in little
stead. So alone he walked the streets of Liverpool and gratuitously
saw the sights.
While on the high seas, Melville had improved his fallow hours by
poring over an old guide-book of Liverpool that had descended to
him from his father. This old family relic was to Melville cherished
with a passionate and reverent affection. Around it clustered most of
the fond associations that are the cords of man. It had been handled
by Allan amid the very scenes it described; it bore some “half-
effaced miscellaneous memoranda in pencil, characteristic of a
methodical mind, and therefore indubitably my father’s”: jottings of
“a strange, subdued, old, midsummer interest” to Melville. And on
the fly-leaves were crabbed inscriptions, and “crayon sketches of
wild animals and falling air-castles.” These decorations were the
handiwork of Melville and his brothers and sisters and cousins. Of his
own contributions, Melville says: “as poets do with their juvenile
sonnets, I might write under this horse, ‘Drawn at the age of three
years,’ and under this autograph, ‘Executed at the age of eight.’”
This guide-book was to Melville a sacred volume, and he expresses a
wish that he might immortalise it. Addressing this unpretentious
looking little green-bound, spotted and tarnished guide-book, he
exclaims: “Dear book! I will sell my Shakespeare, and even sacrifice
my old quarto Hogarth, before I will part from you. Yes, I will go to
the hammer myself, ere I send you to be knocked down in the
auctioneer’s scrambles. I will, my beloved; till you drop leaf from
leaf, and letter from letter, you shall have a snug shelf somewhere,
though I have no bench for myself.”
To the earlier manuscript additions to this guide-book, Melville
added, while on the Atlantic, drawings of ships and anchors, and
snatches of Dibdin’s sea-poetry. And as he lay in his bunk, with the
aid of this antiquated volume he used to take “pleasant afternoon
rambles through the town, down St. James street and up Great
George’s, stopping at various places of interest and attraction” so
familiar seemed the features of the map. But in this vagabondage of
reverie he was but preparing for himself a poignant disillusionment.
Lying in the dim, reeking forecastle, with his head full of deceitful
day-dreams, he was being tossed by the creaking ship towards a
bitter awakening. The Liverpool of the guide-book purported to be
the Liverpool of 1808. The Liverpool of which Melville dreamed was,
of course, without date and local habitation. When Melville found
himself face to face with the solid reality of the Liverpool of 1837, he
was offered an object-lesson in mutability. As the brute facts smote
in the face of his cherished sentimentalisings, he sat his concrete
self down on a particular shop step in a certain street in Liverpool,
reflected on guide-books and luxuriated in disenchantment. “Guide-
books,” he then came to see, “are the least reliable books in all
literature: and nearly all literature, in one sense, is made up of
guide-books. Old ones tell us the ways our fathers went; but how
few of those former places can their posterity trace.” In the end he
sealed his moralising by the pious reflection that “there is one Holy
Guide-Book that will never lead you astray if you but follow it aright.”
There can be no doubt that the ghost of Allan, retracing its mundane
haunts at that moment trailed its shadowy substance through the
offspring of its discarded flesh.
If this same paternal ghost, recognising its kinship with this
obstruction of blood and bone, tracked in futile affection at Melville’s
heels through Liverpool, only a posthumous survival of its terrestrial
Calvinism could have spared it an agonised six weeks; only the
sardonic optimism of a faith in predestination could have saved
Allan’s shade from consternation and fear at the chances of Melville’s
flesh. Or it may be that Allan was sent as a disembodied spectator to
haunt Melville’s wake, by way of penance for his pre-ghostly
theological errors. In any event, Melville, on occasion, took Allan
through the most hideous parts of Liverpool. Of evenings they
strolled through the narrow streets where the sailors’ boarding-
houses were. “Hand-organs, fiddlers, and cymbals, plied by strolling
musicians, mixed with the songs of seamen, the babble of women
and children, and groaning and whining of beggars. From the
various boarding-houses proceeded the noise of revelry and
dancing: and from the open casements leaned young girls and old
women chattering and laughing with the crowds in the middle of the
street.” In the vicinity were “notorious Corinthian haunts which in
depravity are not to be matched by anything this side of the pit that
is bottomless.” Along Rotten-row, Gibraltar-place and Boodle-alley
Melville surveyed the “sooty and begrimed bricks” of haunts of
abomination which to Melville’s boyish eyes (seen through the
protecting lens of Allan’s ghost) had a “reeking, Sodom-like and
murderous look.” Melville excuses himself in the name of propriety
from particularising the vices of the residents of this quarter; “but
kidnappers and resurrectionists,” he declares, “are almost saints and
angels to them.”
Melville satirically pictures himself as pathetically innocent to the
iniquities of the flesh and the Devil when he left home to view the
world. He was, he says, a member both of a Juvenile Total
Abstinence Association and of an Anti-Smoking Society organised by
the Principal of his Sunday School. With dire compunctions of
conscience—which had been considerably weakened by sea-sickness
—Melville had his first swig of spirits—administered medicinally to
him by a paternal old tar,—before they were many hours out upon
the Atlantic. But neither on the high seas nor in England does he
seem to have been prematurely tempted by the bottle. And this, for
the adequate reason that united to his innocence of years, his very
limited finances spared him the solicitations of toping companions as
well as the luxury of precocious solitary tippling. Though at the
beginning of the voyage he refused the friendly offer of a cigar, he
less austerely eschewed tobacco by the time he again struck land.
Melville did not, throughout his life, hold so strictly to the puritanical
prohibitions of his boyhood.
A PAGE FROM ONE OF MELVILLE’S JOURNALS
The youthful member of the Anti-Smoking Society came in later
years to be a heroic consumer of tobacco, and the happiest hours of
his life were haloed with brooding blue haze. “Nothing so beguiling,”
he wrote in 1849, “as the fumes of tobacco, whether inhaled
through hookah, narghil, chibouque, Dutch porcelain, pure Principe,
or Regalia.” On another occasion he expressed a desire to “sit cross-
legged and smoke out eternity.” And the youthful pillar of the
Juvenile Total Abstinence Association, growing in wisdom as he took
on years, lived to do regal penance for his unholy childhood pledge.
His avowed refusal to believe in a Temperance Heaven would seem
to imply a conviction that it is only the damned who never drink. In
his amazing novel Mardi—which won him acclaim in France as “un
Rabelais Americain”—wine flows in ruddy and golden rivers. And the
most brilliantly fantastic philosophising, the keenest wit of the demi-
gods that lounge through this wild novel, are concomitant upon the
heroic draining of beaded bumpers. In Mardi, Melville celebrates the
civilising influences of wine with the same devout and urbane
affection to be found in Horace and Meredith. On occasion, however,
he seems to share Baudelaire’s conviction that “one should be drunk
always”—and drunk on wine in the manner of the best period. He
quotes with approval the epitaph of Cyrus the Great: “I could drink a
great deal of wine, and it did me a great deal of good.” In Clarel he
asks: “At Cana, who renewed the wine?” In the riotous chapter
wherein “Taji sits down to Dinner with five-and-twenty Kings, and a
royal Time they have,” there is an exuberant tilting of calabashes
that would have won the esteem even of Socrates and Pantagruel.
One wonders if Rabelais, in his youth, did not belong to some
Juvenile Total Abstinence Society, or if Socrates, who both lived and
died over a cup, had not as a boy committed an equally heinous
sacrilege to Dionysus.
On board the Highlander Melville was too young yet to have come to
a sense of the iniquity of the deadly virtues. He was not thereby,
however, tempted to the optimism of despair that preaches that
because God is isolated in His Heaven, all is right with the world.
Even at seventeen Melville had keenly felt that much in the world
needs mending. And at seventeen—more than at any other period—
he felt moved to exert himself to set the world aright. Ashipboard,
the field of his operations being very limited, he cast a missionary
eye upon the rum-soaked profanity and lechery of his ship-mates. “I
called to mind a sermon I had once heard in a church in behalf of
sailors,” says Melville, “when the preacher called them strayed lambs
from the fold, and compared them to poor lost children, babes in the
wood, or orphans without fathers or mothers.” Overflowing with the
milk of human kindness at the sad condition of these amiable
outcasts, Melville, during his first watch, made bold to ask one of
them if he was in the habit of going to church. The sailor answered
that “he had been in a church once, some ten or twelve years
before, in London, and on a week-day had helped to move the
Floating Chapel round the Battery from North River.” This first and
last effort of Melville’s to evangelise a shipmate ended in winning
Melville hearty ridicule. “If I had not felt so terribly angry,” he says,
“I should certainly have felt very much like a fool. But my being so
angry prevented me from feeling foolish, which is very lucky for
people in a passion.” Though Melville made no further effort to save
the souls of his shipmates, his own seems not to have been
jeopardised by any hankering after the instruments of damnation.
As has been said, he was without friends, both ashipboard and later
ashore; a complete absence of companionship that on occasion
inspired him with a parched desire for some friend to whom to say
“how sweet is solitude.” He craved in his isolation, he says, “to give
his whole soul to another; in its loneliness it was yearning to throw
itself into the unbounded bosom of some immaculate friend.” In
Redburn, Melville spends a generous number of pages in celebrating
his encounter with a good-for-nothing but courtly youth whom he
calls Harry Bolton. “He was one of those small, but perfectly formed
beings with curling hair, and silken muscles, who seem to have been
born in cocoons. His complexion was a mantling brunette, feminine
as a girl’s; his feet were small; his hands were white; and his eyes
were large, black and womanly: and, poetry aside, his voice was as
the sound of a harp.” How much of Harry Bolton is fact, how much
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