And someone would sputter into his oatmeaclass="underline"
"Ya mean d'one with d'gold toot' in front?"
"Yeah, dat one. She ain't dere any more."
And everybody would try to remember if his relations with the lady in question had ever advanced beyond the stage of a cordial good evening.
But that type of reporting was inaccurate for this reason. The lady in question might have been absent from her particular tramping ground not because of any edict passed by our suave friend, the port medico. There was another handsome diplomat who might have been responsible for tapping the inmates of half the houses within a hundred-mile radius of Buenos Aires.
I mean his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales.
During the couple of weeks we were tied up in Rio Santiago there were big doings in Buenos Aires just twenty miles away and every girl in the district planned to take time off, get dressed up, and go up to see the handsome blond young prince who was touring the world at the time, spreading good will and slipping in occasionally a word for Manchester's cotton goods.
He was being feted everywhere he went and I had seen the ticker-tape parades in his honor in New York. Now he finally had reached Buenos Aires and set all the passionate, feminine hearts of our Latin sister republic aflutter. And those girls in Rio Santiago fluttered with the rest of them and that was all they talked about—their planned visit to Buenos Aires.
So that big blonde dame with the red ribbon around her head and the gold tooth in front might just have gone to stand on a crowded street curb and sigh as the boyish Crown Prince dashed by in an auto. So a lot of guys who might have known her too well may have had nothing to worry about, if they could only be sure which of the two handsome diplomats were responsible for her absence, the young blond one or the older bearded one.
The first few days in port everybody worked. The black gang had a lot of stuff they had to do down in their engine room and they always came topside looking blacker and greasier than ever—all except old Pat, the oiler, who had held down his regular table at the Chicago Bar and was never sober enough to hear the young cherubic-faced First Engineer, whose watch he was on, give him hell. The First was an Irishman too, and Pat knew how to manage him.
The deck crew worked pretty steadily. That quick, complete squelching of Perry and the Polack had stifled their imaginations somewhat and had taken the spine out of them. They all turned to promptly and put in a good day's work—or seemed to.
The one who appeared to be concentrating most on port work, whose face seemed a little grimier than anyone else's, who always walked the deck with the intent look of a man profoundly concerned with doing his daily stint to the best of his ability, and seemed "to live [as Marcus Aurelius Antoninus has assured us in his Commentaries we should] each day as if it were his last—then if there be gods. . . ." I guess I've got that mixed up. The one who worked like that was my pal Joe, A.B., M.S.—able-bodied seaman and master staller—to my complete befuddlement, until, after studying his intense calculated movement carefully for a day or two, I realized the master hadn't let me down. He was still the biggest, laziest, canniest staller on the seven seas. And I quickly apprenticed myself to him, since a deck boy is an apprentice to an A.B.
I learned about stalling from him. That accomplishment has stood me in good stead through all these years and I have a deep debt of gratitude to Joe for my ability to do nothing with an air of such busy concentration that it broods no interruption. That is no mean ability, and lest I've given the impression that Joe or I or anyone else who has studied the science of stalling are just a bunch of good-for-naughts, or indigent, shiftless, bums, accept my assurance I have precedent, authorities, and persuasive arguments.
Stalling has the same relation to performance that platform presence, showmanship or personal touch has to any and all creative work, and requires as much careful training. It is my conviction that the concert pianist's hair tossing, wiggling and squirming at the stool (some prefer a backed chair, others a wide smooth bench, longer and wider than their bottoms, allowing for a slide either way), the needlessly high-flung hands for beating out the deeper fortissimo, the back-breaking crouch for tender pianissimo, is all a planned and calculated stall. What is known to the trade as platform presence.
The honored master of them all, of course, was De Pachmann with his individualized piano juggling, plumbing its legs with his vest-pocket plumb-bob, his chatter and mugging, etc. The pendulous swaying and tiptoe straining for the high notes by the artistes of the Opera, topped by that genius, Caruso, is froth from the same brew. I only heard the master's voice on the His Master's Voice Red Seal recordings. (Why should I mention the name of the recording company? I'd offer them this plug and receive no response—not even a curt no.) And in those recordings it struck me that the ingenious chest-collapsing wails with which he ended every high note and every second musical passage was a definite display of his training and ability for the stall.
The concert violinist's ceremonious large silk handkerchief thrust into his collar before applying the fiddle to the neck, preparing his audience for the sweat he expects to pour down on his rose-amber Stradivarius; even the desperate prayerful frown of the cornetist, a suggestion he fears he mightn't reach the phenomenal high C he's blowing for—are all of a piece with the circus performers who amble across the tightrope (to quote the Chinese again, a very admirable, useful people if only for that reason) with the care and heroic courage of a "man walking on the tail of a tiger."
Friends of mine have told me they have seen these same performers, these funambulists who timidly advance and retreat along the silver thread of their taut wire at scheduled performances, saunter carelessly across the same route shod in flopping galoshes with their hands in their pockets some mornings on their way out to breakfast. It seems they prefer that type of footing to the unswept circus floor after the chariot races which are usually the grand finale of the previous night's performance.
It's needless to go on into my observations of the practiced swooning of the ballet dancers, the heart-rending grunts of professional wrestlers, head-clutching photographs of the philosophers, scientists, writers, et at., that stare back at us from newspapers and periodicals when they are awarded the Nobel Prize or merely a Pulitzer or just pictured there to help peddle their latest book—to go on with this thesis, since that's what it seems to have become. Nor shall I indicate the stalls used by my colleagues in the plastic arts, lest I be accused of betraying my trust and be dubbed the Benedict Arnold of the clay bins.
From all this careful observation I've concluded that all work of any consequence is fifty per cent good sweaty honest toil and fifty per cent a frothy appearance—an air or look about you that you're working very hard. One is useless without the other and in practical performance requires as absolute a balance as the alkaline secretions of your liver.
The dangers of a predominance of either is obvious. How many plodding tireless technicians have we all known who were fired from their jobs just six months before they completed the thirty or forty years of service which would have pensioned them off, for nothing more than the fact they did their work so easily and completely it seemed effortless, therefore useless?
While on the other hand I remember a gifted staller—a studio hack in an architectural sculptor's studio—who had trained himself so well he was able to sleep sitting upright on a high stool every afternoon after a heavy lunch. His case is worth a little more attention. His method briefly was this and I don't advise it for beginners. He spread a large blueprint on a drawing table, rested his elbow on the drawing table, and leaned his chin on the fist of his leaning arm while his other arm and hand rested on the table holding a long pencil. Anyone approaching from any direction on that creaky floor would set the hand with the pencil slowly in motion from point to point on the blueprint as if the aroused sleeper was carefully figuring a knotty problem in scale relation. Eventually he was promoted, given a raise, and assigned to a job that kept him standing up all day! Of course, this person had a fine scholastic background. After years of study he'd given up trying to be an engineer to do sculpture on the assumption it was the easier of the two professions.