Captain Macklin: His MemoirsDavis, Richard Harding
General
Captain Macklin: His Memoirs
Davis, Richard Harding
Adventure stories; Central America -- Fiction; Soldiers -- Fiction; United States Military Academy -- Fiction; War stories
The next day I got the job. I am to begin work on Monday. It is at
Schwartz & Carboy’s. They manufacture locks and hinges and agricultural
things. I saw a lot of their machetes in Honduras with their paper stamp
on the blade. They have almost a monopoly of the trade in South America.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, one of their Spanish clerks had left
them, and when I said I had been in Central America and could write
Spanish easily, Schwartz, or, it may have been Carboy--I didn’t ask him
which was his silly name--dictated a letter and I wrote it in Spanish.
One of the other clerks admitted it was faultless. So, I regret to say,
I got the job. I’m to begin with fifteen dollars, and Schwartz or Carboy
added, as though it were a sort of a perquisite: “If our young men act
gentlemanly, and are good dressers, we often send them to take our South
American customers to lunch. The house pays the expenses. And in the
evenings you can show them around the town. Our young men find that an
easy way of seeing the theatres for nothing.”
Knowing the tastes of South Americans visiting New York, I replied
severely that my connection with Schwartz & Carboy would end daily at
four in the afternoon, but that a cross-town car passed Koster &
Bial’s every hour. I half hoped he would take offence at that, and in
consequence my connection, with Schwartz & Carboy might end instantly
and forever; but whichever one he was, only laughed and said: “Yes,
those Brazilians are a queer lot. We eat up most of our profits bailing
them out of police courts the next morning. Well--you turn up Monday.”
DOBBS FERRY, Sunday, Midnight
It’s all over. It will be a long time before I add another chapter to
my “Memoirs.” When I have written this one they are to be sealed, and
to-morrow they are to be packed away in Aunt Mary’s cedar chest. I am
now writing these lines after everyone else has gone to bed.
It happened after dinner. Aunt Mary was upstairs, and Beatrice was at
the piano. We were waiting for Lowell, who had promised to come up and
spend the evening. I was sitting at the centre-table, pretending to
read, but watching Beatrice. Her back was turned toward me, so I could
stare at her as long as I pleased. The light of the candles on each side
of the music-rack fell upon her hair, and made it flash and burn. She
had twisted it high, in a coil, and there never was anything more
lovely than the burnished copper against the white glow of her skin,
nor anything so noble as the way her head rose upon her neck and sloping
shoulders. It was like a flower on a white stem.
She was not looking at the music before her, but up at nothing, while
her hands ran over the keyboard, playing an old sailor’s “chantey” which
Lowell has taught us. It carries with it all the sweep and murmur of the
sea at night.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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