There was a fourth
that got stranded there too. We called her "Liebchen" and she surely
acted singular, did Liebchen, but I liked her too. Kreps said she was
"symbol," but his ideas and mine didn't agree. He said she was a type
of the "Ewigweibliche," which is another good word though a Dutch
one. Maybe she was. Maybe Veronica was another type. I guess it's a
word that's got some varieties to it.
Veronica belonged to the ship, but had never been cooked, being thin
and stringy; and Kamelillo was a silent, sulky Kanaka that had lived
up and down the Pacific, and harpooned whales, and been shipwrecked
now and then, and was sometimes drunk and sometimes starved, and had
no opinion on these things, except that he'd rather be drunk than
starved. I never knew one that took less interest in life, provided
he was let alone. I liked them all well enough, too. I took things as
they came in those days. I'd as soon have bunked in with an alligator
as a Patagonian.
It was south of Midway Island that we ran into the typhoon come over
from Asia. A typhoon is to an ordinary storm what a surf is to a
deep-sea wave, for it's short but ugly. When it was done with us the
_Anaconda_ began to leak fearful in the waist, and I dare say
the typhoon was excuse enough if she'd broken in two.
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