Bennie Ben Cree

Bennie Ben Cree
by Arthur Colton
Copyright, 1900 by Doubleday & McClure Company
Dedicated To My Mother

CHAPTER I.
BENSON AND CREE--THE COMMODORE INN, FORE AND AFT; AND A POINT STATED BY MY UNCLE BENSON.
If anyone would understand how Ben Cree comes to be what he is for better or worse, he should know first the Commodore Inn and what it meant in those days to have the great wharves for a playground. And I cannot conceive to this day how one can amuse oneself, or be satisfied with any neat door-yard or inland village street, unless one is born a girl with a starched pinafore, which I should think would be a pity.
First, then, you should picture the Commodore Inn; its red bricks streaked with the rain and the beat of damp winds; its high veranda, with the paint coming off the white pillars, and the worn stone steps leading underneath. In front is the brick sidewalk, the cobbled street, the bit of open space with Harrier's junkshop on the right corner; and then the warehouses on either side, all leading down to the slip, Doty's Slip, which is flanked by noble wharves, with huge piles leaning awry and very slippery. The warehouses are roomy and full of queer smells, as if the varied merchandize of fifty years had left something for its old friends, the warehouses, to remember it by. The contents of these warehouses changed continually: cotton, tobacco, slabs of crude rubber, and multitudes of boxes whose contents might be learned sometimes by asking the wharf-master, if you did not mind his cuffing you on the ears. Next there would be the river and its hurrying tides, its choppy waves, the ferryboats, sailboats, and tugs going to and fro: to right and left--seen well by climbing the ware-house roofs--are masts of many ships with innumerable amusing ropes, other wharves with the like slippery brown piles and dark places underneath where the water thieves hid and bored holes up through the planks into the molasses barrels. Mr. Hooley, the wharf policeman, told me of that, and there was much that was attractive in it. For there was a time, before my ideas became settled, when I thought of many different careers. To be a wharf policeman seemed too ambitious a thought, too vain and far away; so that I asked Mr. Hooley's advice about water thieving, having respect for his opinion.
"Naw, Bennie Ben," he said, "'tis low. 'Tis not for the son of yer father, an' yer mother a lady as was ever bor-rn."
"Do you think I could be a wharf policeman, Mr. Hooley?"
"Ah," he said, looking mysterious, "who knows that? Don't ye let young Dillon lick ye, an' maybe--but 'tis a long way fer ye to grow."
But I was speaking of the river. The navy yard lay nearly opposite, and the Wallabout, as that water is called behind the Government Cob Dock. And that stretch of busy river, with its tumult and tides, I love still no less, and love the thick smell of the wharves and ware-houses.
My two grandfathers, Benson and Cree, were shipping merchants together, "Benson & Cree," long ago, when you did not have to go beyond the Harlem for a bit of country. Indeed, my Grandmother Cree, I am told, had a great flower and vegetable garden, and there was an orchard behind the house, where in my time was but a little yard. The house was built for some colonial gentleman's residence, and my grandfathers bought it when prosperity came to them. And there they lived together with their families, and there were my father and mother born, for they were cousins, and also Uncle Benson and the two others who went down off Barnegat: a great, warm-hearted house, red-walled and white-pillared.
The firm in its best days owned five ships. And by an odd arrangement one of them was always sailed by a member of the firm. They had their turns, one abroad and one at home. From this came the rhyme,
"Benson and Cree, One at home and one at sea";
my father used to sing it, when absentminded, to a queer haphazard tune. And I have heard Harrier, the junk-shop man, sing it too. But my father, if he saw me listening, would stop and seem ashamed, which I could not explain at first.
My father was an only child, and my mother an only daughter, but there were once three Benson boys. I am not sure of my Grandfather Cree, nor of my two grandmothers, at what dates they died, but in the year 1838 three of the five ships were lost: one of them with Grandfather Benson (in what waters is unknown), one of them with two of his sons off Barnegat, and one of them left a tilted wreck in the mid-Atlantic. And that same