Barter (Rowland)

Front matter

BARTER

By HENRY C. ROWLAND

ILLUSTRATED BY ANTON OTTO FISCHER

Part I

“What Could You and Cyril Do if a Pirate Held You Up When You Had a Cargo? You've Got No Guns, Have You?”

AS I WALKED out of my uncle's boiler factory it struck me that there was a curious change in the hitherto dreary environs of the plant. Everything about the horrid place looked for the first time bright and colorful, seemed to scintillate with a shimmering vitality that infused with picturesque interest even such drab details as freight cars and refuse dumps and those stark waste spaces worse than mere desolation, which are the greasy salt marshes encroached upon by dismal shops for the manufacture of such gross necessities of life as modern conditions require.

It was late September, a chiaroscuro day, with heavy cloud masses drifting across a brilliant sky. Purple shadows sped along beneath them on the tawny flats with a speed that looked out of all proportion to that of the billowy fragments hanging overhead. I remembered how I used to race my pony with them as a boy, trying to keep in the bright sunshine. I had been trying to do that thing for the last few years, but afoot, and the shadow had always caught me up.

Well, here today it seemed to have caught me up again, but this time there was no gloom about it. Only the big boss, my uncle, knew that I had been fired; but he did not know that I was glad of it, that I rejoiced at being obliged to quit an infernal job in a clamoring Hades that must soon have shattered my nerves completely and left me stunned and quivering, like a fish feebly flapping on the surface after the explosion of a submarine mine. My war service six years before had been the command of a mine sweeper on the Bay of Biscay, and I had seen a good many such poor fish flopping round.

That boiler factory had been, speaking literally and without vulgarity, a hell of a job for a man of nervous temperament and one brought up to every luxury of early life. Boiled down, it amounted to the unusual combination of timekeeper and pay clerk; and as such, was a tribute to my uncle's esteem of my honesty, if not to my ability. The rupture had come because, after being warned, I had shown leniency in the matter of docking for short time a riveter about whose family troubles I had interested myself and was sorry for. As my uncle pointed out with more justice than mercy, he objected to being made a philanthropist without his knowledge or consent. My answer to the effect that he would never be one otherwise may have brought us to a better misunderstanding.

Like many employers, there were two bets he overlooked in my dismissal: One, that he might have some difficulty to fill my place with another man as conscientious about his work in most respects and for whom the factory force would work as willingly; and second, that I was really overjoyed at being chucked out of a bedlam in which I felt it my duty to remain even while convinced that it would shatter me in the end. I had always been sensitive to sharp concussions and would probably have been one of the first to go down under shell shock if my war service had been ashore. But in mine sweeping there is apt to be but one such shock, and that to cure all ills.

On this bright day of my most recent failure I was positively glowing with relief as I hopped a trolley car to go back to lodgings between which and the boiler factory there was not much to choose. Past misfortunes were for the moment set aside. Gone was the big estate on which I had been born. Gone the pomp and circumstance that had greeted this event, like the birth of a crown prince, in the matter of rich inheritance.

No such dreary retrospect was in my mind as the nearly empty trolley car bowled along over the filled-in track across the Jersey meadows. Here was the whole wide world open to me. That fact impressed me more than the door to the confines of a job slammed behind me. I became at once intensely interested in the purple cloud shadows drifting across the mellow marsh, and in a big Pennsylvania Pullman train. It looked like an expensive mechanical toy to me at its distance of a mile or two, and to the passengers of that train the trolley car on which I bucketed along must have looked like the cheap toy of a sidewalk vender.

We crossed a clanging bridge where a squat, filthy barge named Fairy Queen was patiently accepting a cargo of muck gnawed out by a dredge. A little beyond it was a settlement of shacks that bore the same relation to the community beyond that a spore might bear to the proliferating cells of a cancer. It was intensely interesting to me to observe this development, although I viewed it inversely to the generally accepted idea of reclamation of waste land. I saw it more as a blot or a desolation hitherto useless but beautiful in its soft neutral coloring and space. Rapidly it was becoming intensively useful and hideous. Yet this fact struck me with no sense of loss any more than it would have seemed to me a loss to burn a hole in a beautiful rug when as a little boy I had experimented with small toy stationary engines. There were lots more marshes like that somewhere in the world, just as there were lots more costly rugs. Little boys had to destroy pretty things for experiment and pleasure, and just so did grown-up ones destroy them fer experiment and profit. It was the function of the earth to supply material! for such adventures in experience.

I was bound now for a haven of peace and quiet where I had spent a week's vacation the month before, first stopping to collect my few effects at a pretty awful lodging house on the fringe of Newark, close to a big railroad yard where switch engines shunted and shouted passionately the night through. Just across the street was a dance hall with a jazz band that drowned its frequent sounds of strife. But my two rooms were in the rear spacious and sunny, looking on one of those vast mud flats where the tide is usually out and the mosquitoes in, with an oily channel where tugboats tooted for the draw. I liked the propinquity of boats.

The place to which I was now going for a brief rest before hunting another job was about as different in the point of noise as one can possibly imagine; Beach City, down on Barnegat Bay. On my vacation the month before, the first two nights bad nearly finished me. They were of that stilly sort in which I had oft awakened because of a peace less heavenly than of the tomb to one accustomed to a never-ending racket. The clean and well-kept cottage where I had found lodging was near the edge of the bay, too far from the channel for the din of poorly muffled motorboats to be disturbing, too removed from any thoroughfare for noisy cars.

I had found it through the kindly offices of a decent young fellow who drove a station taxi, and I really think he drove me there not because it was about as far from the station as you could go in Beach City, but through a friendly wish to do a good turn both to me and to Mrs. Fairchild, whom he greatly admired. She proved to be a sensible and pretty woman of thirty-four or five, the widow of a retired sea captain very much her senior. He had died two or three years before, leaving her the cottage and a sort of combination ship chandler's junk store, which she had turned partly into a notion shop, whatever that may be.

During my week's sojourn there I had seen very little of my hostess, who spent her days in the shop. But in our brief meetings I learned that she hailed originally from Boothbay, Maine, and that her late husband, Captain Fairchild, had also been a Maine seafaring man. I could have told her origin in any case because of her Anglican accent and that fresh bloom that even doughnuts and pie do not destroy in the complexions of the pretty women of the foggy Maine coast, perhaps because they know how to make doughnuts and pies properly.

Having gathered up the remnants of what had once been costly clothes and jammed them into my jaded valises, I called down to a beaver-head who was a sort of self-appointed valet of mine and requested that he scoop up the rest of the detritus and crowd it into a couple of sea bags. Then I enriched him and sent him off with a telegram to Mrs. Fairchild to warn her that I was coming back to Beach City and hoped she could put me up. I was all square with my host, but went into the restaurant underneath and shook hands with him and his wife and gave his little boy a half dollar to remember me by—until he could get to the pastry shop on the corner.

There is this to be said in favor of such places. They are easy to get out of. All roads may lead to Rome, but there are supplementary routes to get you out of Monte Carlo, Havana and Newark. Then, on arriving at Beach City, I was surprised and touched to find Mrs. Fairchild there on the platform to meet me. She had a flivver tucked into the drift of cars against the quay.

“I thought I'd close the shop and come after you myself, Mr. Stirling,” she said. “I can't put you up at my house, so it seemed the least I could do was to see you made comfortable somewhere. A friend of mine has a nice room.”

“But I've set my heart on going back to your house,” I objected. “I shan't be any bother.”

“Of course you wouldn't, Mr. Stirling. The trouble is they are going to foreclose and sell me out. I'm trying now to make a clean sweep of everything and get clear of this port of missing chances while I've got anything left at all.”

“I had no idea it was as bad as that, Mrs. Fairchild.”

“Oh, that's not the half of it, Mr. Stirling. My late husband's ship-chandler business was killed by a new big store down on the wharf, so I turned my shop into notions and things. And now there's a full-powered five-and-ten store just opened opposite me. My cottage is too far out on the flat to have any value, so I might as well let it go. And now to do me to a turn, I've just had news that a hotel I owned a share in down Boothbay way has burned and the insurance allowed to lapse.”

This jeremiad so cheerfully stated made my own perplexities seem slight. I suggested then to Mrs. Fairchild that since I could mobilize in about five minutes, she might as well take me in until she got her sailing orders. I told her that I had got the gate for having dealt leniently with a workman at the cost of the plant, but that I had made a provision for some months of unemployment and so we were to some extent struck adrift in the same boat. Meantime, I wanted a few days and nights of absolute rest.

So Mrs. Fairchild finally gave in and drove back to her cottage.

We Got Out Around Cape Cod in a Clear Strong Nor'wester. It Took Us Down Around Nantucket Shoals

II

AFTER a long night's sleep, the silence of the place now comforting because I was prepared for it, I walked four streets to the trolley and rode down Ocean Avenue until I came to Mrs. Fairchild's store. I wanted to learn how long I might hope to be her lodger and something about her own plans. When a man is so abysmally alone as I was at that time, and not in very good health, a kind friend assumes the proportions of a guardian angel. I liked Mrs. Fairchild and I knew that she liked me, and from what she had said the day before it appeared that we were both in the same blind alley, an impasse from which it might take a little planning to escape.

Mrs. Fairchild's proved to be one of these narrow-fronted shops that you can never tell much about until you get inside. There was a display of small modern trashy articles in its front, seagoing necessities were farther in its depths, and serviceable heavy junk in the rear end of it. Beginning with the ubiquitous cheap jewelry, bead necklaces, three-dollar wrist and other watches, fancy combs, objects partly of apparel, partly decoration, it ran back into miscellaneous hardware of the ten-cent-store kind—rope, wire, boat fit piping, tubing, canned goods, all sorts. Visions that might last indefinitely; and in a sort of storeroom, heaps of heavier gear that would be classed as junk, yet sound and representing a standard value—used galvanized chain and small anchors, paints and oils, sails weathered but still sound, blocks and tackles and the like.

All this was stuff left from the stock of Captain Fairchild, who had run the store for some years after quitting the sea, no doubt with modest savings. But his trade had since been cut from under him by the new big modern store down by the inlet when his widow decided to try a line of such small cheap goods as were displayed in the show windows. This had gone fairly well until the opening of the five-and-ten-cent store across the street. But here now was Mrs. Fairchild's business lopped off at both ends, so to speak, and the poor women left with a great mass of miscellaneous stuff that she could only hope at best to dispose of at a ruinous loss.

Nobody was in sight as I entered; but hearing the murmur of voices from the cubby-hole of an office in the rear, I walked back there and found Mrs. Fairchild in consultation with a tall, big-framed young man whom I had met when there before. His name was Cyril Whitecliff, and Mrs. Fairchild had told me that he embodied the functions of bookkeeper, caretaker and general clerk.

Cyril Whitecliff was an English Jew, born and bred in Bermuda. He was very good looking in a curious old-fashioned way, like a character out of one of Captain Marryat's books; rather of the Spanish or Portuguese Semitic type—tall, lean, big-boned, but graceful, and with an eagerness of manner and expression that was yet modest. Fairchild had told me that he was her chief and only clerk.

The two of them were in striking contrast; Mrs. Fairchild, of Anglo-Saxon fairness, with fluffy light-brown hair, blue eyes and a full, strong figure that was neither fat nor even plump, but more that of a mature woman athlete, swimmer and oarswoman, which indeed she had been as a girl; the young man, with his thick, black, lustrous hair, from which grew down on either lean cheek the sideburns of a Spanish, cavalier, aquiline features and a general shapely ranginess, was not at all the American conception of Hebrew, usually Central European. He looked like one of the early Phenician traders that were the pioneers in building up the broader commerce of the world, a sailor keen in barter who, strictly in the line of business, did not shirk the risks of the sea, nor the greater ones of the rapacious desperadoes that hovered over it. His skin was of a fresh, clear, pale olive, with a tinge of color showing through just now in his excitement.

Mrs. Fairchild looked up at me with a nod and a smile.

“I'm glad you came in, Mr. Stirling. Cyril here is getting me all worked up.”

“Talking business?” I asked.

“Well, he calls it that, but it sounds like bunk. What do you think of the store?”

Not to discourage her by saying what I really thought of her assets, I began guardedly:

“Well, I should say if you were to pick it up just as it stands and set it down at Nome, where they've just made another strike, or up the Mazaruni, where they're getting diamonds, or in the Crimea or some fur region, you might have a 2”

This was as far as I got, because the effect of my cautious speech on Cyril was peculiar. He had risen respectfully, and now he flung out his arms with a sort of triumphant gesture.

“There! What did I tell you, Mrs. Fairchild? He takes the very words out of my mouth. Mr. Stirling has got the same idea. I was born in Bermuda, and my father but I have been all over the America as ship's steward, and I know what I am talking about.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“I say the same as you, sir. That all this stock is no good here. It would not fetch five hundred dollars, but there are many places where you could do big trade with it.”

I shook my head. “Not at the present rate of exchange, I'm afraid.”

“But that is just the point,” Cyril cried. “Foreign trade is at a standstill. There is no market for American or British products in the West Indies and South America because of the exchange. Silver is down. Prices are prohibitive on a gold basis. You could not sell this stuff for the price of transportation; but you could trade it off.”

“For what?”

“For the products of the countries where such things are badly needed and are a long way from the centers where they manufacture them. Just now the sources of supply, Great Britain and Germany, are not flowing; and, with the rate of exchange on the American dollar, they cannot buy. This is just the moment for the sort of barter that has made big fortunes in the past.”

“It sounds interesting, even if unfeasible,” I admitted

“But it might be done, Mr. Stirling. And the turnover would be enormous. You could trade this stuff for balata and tonka beans and copal and cacao and sisal, or even coconuts and bananas and vicufia wool and yerba maté 2”

“Hold on,” I protested, “you make me dizzy. Then why not citrate of lime in Sicily and salt from Trapani; or if you want to make a real trading voyage, you might go to the Sea of Okhotsk and barter along its shores for ginseng root and sables and elk antlers and mushrooms and illicit gold and sealskins, and around the islands for ambergris and algæ 2”

Cyril waved his big powerful hands.

“I see that you have caught the idea, sir. But I am thinking now about the shores of the Caribbean. It is not so far away. You could trade off such stuff as this at a tremendous profit, then bring what you got for it back here to market.”

Mrs. Fairchild looked at me and gave a helpless laugh.

“How did he get this way, Mr. Stirling? It's not catching, I hope.”

“This is the most contagious disorder in the world, Mrs. Fairchild. All adventure is that, but most people are rendered immune by fixed business ideas. A trade adventure is the most insidious, though, because you can usually manage to kid yourself into thinking that it is bound to be profitable.”

“Mrs. Fairchild has no fixed business ideas,” Cyril said; “and so far as the venture goes, she has nothing to lose. This stock of hers is no good here. But in the right place it might be worth a goodish lot. Once when I was aboard the Essiquibo I swapped a cheap belt with a flashy buckle, a set of poker dice, a pair of these new-fangled horsehide shoes and a three-dollar wrist watch bought in a pawnshop, for a pearl I sold afterward for one hundred and fifty dollars. The trade showed a turnover of about 1200 per cent.”

“And how,” I asked, “do you plan to peddle your wares where they may bring so much profit?”

“Ah, sir, that's the problem. Since we've got scarcely any cash to speak of, we would have to find a partner to put up a boat of sorts on a fifty-fifty basis against all this stuff of Mrs. Fairchild's, then be able to navigate it. A small fishing boat, or the like.”

I smiled and shook my head.

“That sort of scheme might appeal to some amateur who owned a boat, just for the fun of it; but as a business venture, I'm afraid it would be hard to interest anybody. Carrying the contents of a general ship chandler's junk and notion store on the verge of bankruptcy to some far distant and dubious market does not sound much of a business proposition, especially when rum running shows the profit that it does.”

“Rum running is not a business, Mr. Stirling, any more than any other sort of smuggling. Besides, it's not such easy money as most people seem to think. The big fellows steal all the bait and the little fish get the gaff.”

“Yes, it's a rotten game at any price,” I admitted. “What you suggest appeals to me a whole lot, though. Some years ago I used to navigate boats of my own in ocean races, and I commanded a fish-boat mine sweeper of the flotilla based on Lorient during the war. But the trouble is I've got no boat and very little cash.”

“That's the trouble here, sir. It seems a rotten shame to give all this stuff away for next to nothing, or wait for the sheriff to grab it, when I know of lots of places where it could be traded off for products of standard value.”

“Would you be let?” I asked.

“You would have to get a trading license for the country, sir, if your plan was to chaffer along the coast. But the best way would be to deal directly with some local storekeeper who was a merchant trader. The profit would be less, but you would not run the risk of being caught up.”

“What's to prevent this merchant trader from doing just what you propose?” I asked.

“Nothing, sir; but he doesn't. He pays money for such stock as Mrs. Fairchild has here, or at least he used to before the exchange was so high. Then, even if he trades a lot of it for native products, it has to be shipped and marketed. Every separate transaction slices off so much of the profit. Besides, there's always the chance of doing a little free trade when it looks safe.”

“That's what appeals to me,” I said; “swapping your stylish hat and stick and gloves for a little pearl or something.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Fairchild, “it all sounds crazy to me. All this new stock of mine must have its money value.”

Cyril shook his head.

“Not here and now, Mrs. Fairchild, with that store across the street just opening up. It would not be worth shifting to some other place, unless you shifted it a long distance, to Nome or the Mazaruni, just like Mr. Stirling says. And then it might be worth a lot, but not in money—in trade.”

I turned this statement in my mind.

“What sort of vessel would you want?”

“A little schooner, sir, with some auxiliary power to get in and out of places. A fifty-ton fishing boat would do the trick. I put a low assets value on this stuff in the store as appraised under conditions here, end of the season and a big competitor across the street. But the stock itself is all right, and so is the junk in the rear. It's mostly ship's gear, a little used, but sound and good.”

“How about your overhead if you were to get hold of the sort of little vessel you need?” I asked. “You would need a stake to run her, and ready cash is just what Mrs. Fairchild hasn't got.”

“That's the trouble, Mr. Stirling,” Cyril admitted sadly. “It seems a pity, though. Given a proper market, all this stock of Mrs. Fairchild's ought to be worth today about four thousand dollars, and just as it stands I doubt if it would net her five hundred.”

There seemed no just ground for disputing this. Cyril appeared to know what he was talking about, and from the long lists on the desk I judged that he had spent a day or two in taking stock. The standardized jokes about selling ice at the North Pole and coals in Newcastle—which latter was actually done not so long ago—appeared now to fit with more grim fact than humorous fancy this junk-notion-ship-chandler's shop that was in a fair way to be the commercial ruin of Mrs. Fairchild.

There was no help for it, that I could see. Just another of those tragic little business failures that do not make more of a ripple in the sea of commerce than does a land bird when it drops into the ocean exhausted after being blown a hundred miles offshore.

Then the destiny of small birds and small businesses took a hand in the affair, just as if the song sparrow when about to give up the losing struggle were to sight a fisherman coming in from the Grand Banks and flutter aboard and find shelter in a dory nested on the deck, and be given some crumbs of biscuit, then the next morning flit out, to find Cape Ann close aboard.

I strolled out into the shop and looked with regret at the many cheap and more or less useful articles displayed in the show cases and on the shelves; all bright, attractive rubbish that is produced in such astonishing volume and disappears no man knows where. Thousands of dollars changing hands for its manufacture and sale and purchase, then vanishing like the colors of a sunset; many people, especially the young ones, delighted immeasurably to possess it for a little while before the ash man garners it.

Then, happening to glance through the street window, I saw at a motor-service station diagonally across the street a girl I knew.

She was a very pretty and expensive looking girl whom I had for several years admired a great deal, but with reservations. Her name was Allaire Forsyth, and I had known her brother very well before the illness that had carried him off.

There is no excuse to be offered for what I did now under the impulse of the moment. It merely happened that way; one of those inconsiderate snatches at opportunity, with no more worth saying. Allaire was at the wheel of a costly runabout that I knew could not be her own. I walked out of the shop and greeted her as an old family friend.

III

ALLAIRE looked at me with a good deal of astonishment. “Pom Stirling, whatever are you doing in this muck hole?”

“Walking up and down, like Satan,” I said, “and hoping that gentleman may find some work for my idle hands.”

“This ought to be a good place for it. Since I've been sitting here three prosperous-looking importers have stopped to ask respectfully if I mightn't be needing a little high-class nerve tonic. Not hard to guess the leading local industry.”

She gave me a keen, curious look. Allaire was almost ash-blond, but was saved from being entirely of this coloring, which I always disliked, by a copper tinge to her hair in certain lights. Her eyes were baffling, long, tawny and hard.

“Do you mind my standing here talking to you?” I asked.

“No, I don't happen to be escapading. Drove over from Atlantic City with Evelyn Lee. She took a cottage for September to clear up the fag ends of the children's whooping cough before returning to Washington.

“Are you going back there with her, Allaire?”

“Oh, yes; always a professional young visitor and little sister to the rich. I'm pretty sick of it, Pom. Sometimes tempted to follow your example and get a real job instead of a masked one. It's pretty awful when you have to be a smoke scream between 2” She pulled up short. “Get in beside me, Pom. We have time to swap hard-luck stories. I left Evelyn out here at a truck farm. A former maid of hers married a gardener. Sometimes I feel like marrying one myself, but I'd rather it were a rum runner.”

She shot me another keen yellow gleam from under lashes that were very long and black.

“Well, this ought to be the market place,” I said. “Speaking of jobs, I've been drummed out of the boiler barracks. Dear uncle got sore because I was generous at his expense in the matter of time out on a man who has worked there fifteen years and has sickness in his family.”

“That sounds like uncle,” said Allaire, “but doesn't quite explain your presence here, unless to seek forgetfulness at the fountainhead. But you never did that thing.”

“No; and less now than ever, with the fountain full of filth. My rather hopeless quest at present is to find the owner of some small vessel that isn't earning her upkeep and persuade him to throw in with some of us for a little trading venture.”

Just as I had expected, this statement, which was actually honest, brought a quick response. Allaire turned and gave me another searching look that was brief but intent.