Books › Blue Book v073 n06 [1941-10], 1941 › scan 15
Scan 15
Blue Book v073 n06 [1941-10], 1941
32 lines. Read by computer on 18 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1Salvage Harry
3They have a strangeness on them, and some hidden strength, those who follow the outland trails; they serve a mistress never known to common men, and her call can be a most compelling thing. Sometimes it's a puff of heady wind across an open space, a sight of sunrise after heavy gales, when the sea is green and shot with cobalt fire along the thin horizon lip. Sometimes it's nothing but the long-drawn snore of a homing ship prying the mist apart along a channel's way, its sound reaching faintly to a smoke-filled room where wanderers sit to drink and talk. One of them will lift his face to listen with his eyes a-pucker and his head a-tilt, suddenly knowing that call is meant for him. And knowing, too, that when that lady out there nods your way, you just get up and walk, that's all.
5Maybe that's the way it was with Captain Harry Baintree, skipper and owner of the schooner Pandoman. It's more than likely by the tall, spare, solid look of him, though of course no one would ever ask a silly thing like that in the Eastern port of Menado on the northern coast of Celebes. That's where she sent him, that fickle little wench with sunshot seaclouds in her hair, the loom of ocean water in her beckoning eyes. She sent another out there too, in her slyly jesting way; a girl with russet hair and a figure men could dream about in the stillness of the middle watch. She played the violin in the dining-room of the Hôtel Continental on the southern river bank. That's where Captain Baintree first saw her, while taking Minahasa coffee and a tip of Holland gin liqueur with Willem Van der Proust, his friend the surgeon from over Government House.
7She came in quietly with the fiddle in her hand, and the burghers stopped their babbling all at once, so that the punkahs creaked and rustled clearly overhead. Harry didn't notice: he was telling Van der Proust, quite calmly, of rumors of enemy raiders loose about the Sea of Celebes, with destroyers from Singapore and Australia out upon her hunt. He didn't believe any truck like that, he said. Proust made no reply, only pulling the gray tufts of his sidewhiskers. Till suddenly Harry looked up, startled. And there she was, dressed in some filmy blue stuff, with wild orchids at her breast. Then she started to play, going smilingly from table to table. In there were coffee-planters, traders from the Java Sea, grizzled gutta-percha boomers, hard-fisted skippers from the Molucca schooner fleets, their weather-beaten heads all turning to follow her. She looked so small, so slender and so straight, making lovely music in that outlandish place. Harry just sat and stared.
9"Surprised? No?" Van der Proust chuckled. "She was with a troupe of players coming along from Macassar. Pallerson, the scoundrel who ran the show, skipped with all the cash. Left them high and dry. Most of them scattered after him in the Stroomen Kaap ship. One of 'em's dancing nautch in a sailor dive on the other bank. You know what that means. Not this girl. She wouldn't run away. Went to old Braunberg and told him she'd work out the guilders she owed if he'd give her half a chance. Well, he was pretty angry, but not what you'd call a fool. You see? The place is now jammed every night. Wait'll you hear her play 'Till Eulenspiegel' to make the burghers dream about the Zuyder Zee! Hey? What do you say, Captain?"
11For some time Harry didn't say anything. It seemed to him she was looking straight at him, the way he was at her. The music, he was sure came from her eyes and lips, not from the instrument at all. So he sat there staring, while Doctor Proust kept mumbling on. "Her name is Althea; that's all about it anyone knows. She seems to be looking for some one or something out here in Celebes."
13"Of course," Harry could murmur at last. "Aren't you?" And he stood up.
15Proust chuckled again, not seeing the fellow who had come swaying in through the barroom door. He was dressed in dirty whites, and it was quite plain the music annoyed his drunkenness. He lurched past two tables, complaining thickly: "What kind music y'call that for sailormen? Give us a chantey, sister. Liven up the dump!"
17He swayed toward her. Harry strode quickly across, took him by the scruff of the neck and calmly tossed him out. It happened in an instant; the girl never lost a note. She just frowned, meaning to let him know she could care for all that sort of trouble that was in her way. The music bubbled and danced along to its end, a Chopin waltz. She smiled at all the applause; and when the Malay waiters started gliding across the floor, she came up to Captain Baintree.
19"I'm really grateful." She ought to talk as well as play, Harry was thinking, hearing her throaty contralto. "But you shouldn't do that. There's no need."
21"I enjoyed it. The music too," he added, grinning. "When do you play 'Till Eulenspiegel'? Doctor Proust's been telling me."
23The surgeon was there by now, fleshy and jovial. "You mustn't be angry, Althea," he rumbled. "It's just Captain Baintree's own uncouth way. We call him Salvage Harry. Any beachcomber or down-and-outer can find his feet in Harry's schooner Pandoman. He does things for them a doctor never could. What do you show them, Captain, out there where you go? He's a good man to know, Althea."
25The girl looked quickly up at Baintree's weather-beaten face. "Yes," she agreed with simplicity, "I expect."
27"Ask him to tell you about the pestilential holes he goes to in his Pandoman. He makes the Islands on the Line sound like a sight of heaven instead of tropical hell." Proust shook his large side-whiskered head sadly. "Why do you all come here?" he wanted to know. "What do you expect to find? Well, au revoir. I must look at a lovely fracture now. Bugis fellah busted his hip. Magnificent! Seen nothing like it before."
29He bustled off, waving with one hand and comforting his whiskers with the other. Althea and Harry smiled after him. And that night he told her what the Doctor said he would. He told her what he'd learned about the Spice Islands and the Boni Gulf, and the islands in the north where the Pandoman often went.
31Between her numbers she stood beside him on the wide veranda of the hotel. So how could he help speaking of things like that with the heady scent of her nearness on him, the river burbling below, Chinese
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