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"It iss not of use," said Kreps, and he sighed. "You understand not de yearning, de ideal. Listen! Liebchen, she iss de abstraction, de principle. Aber no. You cannot. De soul iss alone, iss not comprehend." "All right," says Kamelillo. "You look here. Go see thas girl whale on a bamboo raft. No good sit on log all night, sing hoohoo song." Kreps was taken with that notion.
Kreps was a man very given to sentiments, in particular about "Ewigweibliche," and I never knew a man that kept himself more entertained. He settled down for the time, with Veronica and Kamelillo for his family, in a fine house in the upper town of San Francisco. Kamelillo used to cook unlikely things which Kreps and Veronica ate peaceable between them.
Thought she might be a friend of yours," says he, "meaning no reflections." I said I was acquainted with her, and Kreps took off his glasses and wiped his eyes. "She vass of de tenderness, das Zartlichkeit." It made him sad to see Liebchen dead, that was full of sensibility, and Veronica come back with dignity, she being a conventional hen and scornful and cold by nature.
She is de sharm of everlasting feminine," and he heaved a sigh. I says: "Ewigweibliche!" I says. "Everlasting feminine! What's the use of that?" I took to studying Liebchen too, and it appeared to me Kreps' idea wasn't useful He was a man to have sentiments naturally.
We steered north, for there were odd islands in that direction by the chart, without names enough to go around them; and on the second morning we saw a high shore to port, with surf like a white rag sewed along the bottom, and rags of mist sticking to the black bluffs. "Ach," says Kreps, and the tears trickled down under his spectacles. "Gott sei dank! I am mude of the sea. It iss too large."
He ran away through the woods around the north shore, and I ran after, to see him study the habits of the cetacean. Liebchen had sidled off and was rolling about in the middle of the harbour when we came to the bluffs, where the wine-palms and cocoanut trees leaned over and the channel was narrow. Kreps fell to chopping the landward roots, and I saw he wanted to block the channel.
I vill go mit Kamelillo, my friend." Kamelillo spent the morning making a bamboo raft, and in the afternoon they put out. Liebchen was over by the harbour entrance, lying low in the water and maybe asleep. Kamelillo had a bamboo pole in his hand to pole the raft with, but he had shod it with his harpoon head. They drew alongside, and Kreps was facing front, with his back to Kamelillo.
But they kept on till there was only a black spot near the edge of the sky. It came on afternoon. The tide was out, and we lay about. There was not enough wind to flutter the signal on the bluffs, which was Kreps' red shirt, and hung there to entertain any one that might come by. Kamelillo suddenly sat up. "Hear im?" he says.
And yet again there was folks like Kreps and Stevey Todd, say, mild and warm people, and a bit simple, each in his way, and yet they always kept themselves entertained somehow. "All things are one," are they? I couldn't see it either, no more than Sadler. For this is the Kiyi Proposition. You says: "Here's a bad job. Who did it?" I says: "I don't know." You says: "Well, who pays for it?"
He'd sit out on the end of a log moonlight nights, with his fat face and spectacles shining, and Liebchen would muzzle around with a ten-foot snout like an engine boiler, and a piggy eye; and he'd sing German lullabies; "Du bist wie eine Blume." I didn't think she was like a flower. She was more like an oil tank. So Kreps would sing to her in the moonlight, but Kamelillo didn't like her.
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