Especially did the steward attend upon the Ancient Mariner, for whom he
had come to conceive a strong admiration, if not affection. The old
fellow was different from his cabin-mates. They were money-lovers;
everything in them had narrowed down to the pursuit of dollars. Daughtry,
himself moulded on generously careless lines, could not but appreciate
the spaciousness of the Ancient Mariner, who had evidently lived
spaciously and who was ever for sharing the treasure they sought.
"You'll get your whack, steward, if it comes out of my share," he
frequently assured Daughtry at times of special kindness on the latter's
part. "There's oodles of it, and oodles of it, and, without kith or kin,
I have so little time longer to live that I shall not need it much or
much of it."
And so the Ship of Fools sailed on, all aft fooling and befouling, from
the guileless-eyed, gentle-souled Finnish mate, who, with the scent of
treasure pungent in his nostrils, with a duplicate key stole the ship's
daily position from Captain Doane's locked desk, to Ah Moy, the cook, who
kept Kwaque at a distance and never whispered warning to the others of
the risk they ran from continual contact with the carrier of the terrible
disease.
Kwaque himself had neither thought nor worry of the matter. He knew the
thing as a thing that occasionally happened to human creatures. It
bothered him, from the pain standpoint, scarcely at all, and it never
entered his kinky head that his master did not know about it. For the
same reason he never suspected why Ah Moy kept him so at a distance. Nor
had Kwaque other worries. His god, over all gods of sea and jungle, he
worshipped, and, himself ever intimately allowed in the presence,
paradise was wherever he and his god, the steward, might be.
And so Michael. Much in the same way that Kwaque loved and worshipped
did he love and worship the six-quart man. To Michael and Kwaque, the
daily, even hourly, recognition and consideration of Dag Daughtry was
tantamount to resting continuously in the bosom of Abraham. The god of
Messrs. Doane, Nishikanta, and Grimshaw was a graven god whose name was
Gold. The god of Kwaque and Michael was a living god, whose voice could
be always heard, whose arms could be always warm, the pulse of whose
heart could be always felt throbbing in a myriad acts and touches.
No greater joy was Michael's than to sit by the hour with Steward and
sing with him all songs and tunes he sang or hummed. With a quantity or
pitch even more of genius or unusualness in him than in Jerry, Michael
learned more quickly, and since the way of his education was singing, he
came to sing far beyond the best Villa Kennan ever taught Jerry.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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