Careers of Danger and Daring Part 3

After a time Lawlor, having reached the top, called down something, and Merrill answered. It was my turn now. I climbed out through a small window and stood on the ledge, while "Steeple Bob" dropped the swing noose over my head and proceeded to lash me fast to seat and ropes.

"That's in case a suicidal impulse should get hold of you!" he said, smiling, but meaning it. "Now, keep this rope between your legs, and work your hands up along it as we lift you. It's anch.o.r.ed to St. Peter."

Then he explained how I was to press my toes against the steeple side, so as to keep my knees from barking on the shingles.

"And don't look down at all," he told me. "Just watch your ropes and take it easy. Are you ready?"

At this moment Walter said something in a low tone, and Merrill asked me to lend him my knife. I handed it out, and he stuck it in his pocket.

"You don't need this now," said he, and a moment later the pulley ropes tightened and my small swing-board lifted under me. I was rising.

"Shove off there with your toes!" he cried. "Take short steps. Put your legs wider apart. Wider yet. You don't have to pull on the rope. Just slide your hands along. Now you're going!"

I saw nothing but the steeple side in front of me, and the life-line hanging down like a bell-rope between my spread legs, and the pulley block creaking by my head, and the toes of my shoes as I pressed them against the shingles step by step. It struck me as a ridiculous thing to be climbing a steeple in patent-leather shoes. I smiled to think of the odd appearance I must present from below. And then for the first time I let my eyes turn into the depths, and caught a glimpse of men on housetops watching me. I saw Merrill's upturned face down where the ropes ended. And I saw little horses wriggling along on the street.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HOW THE STEEPLE-CLIMBER GOES UP A FLAGPOLE.]

There were three places where the steeple narrowed into slenderer lengths, and at each one was a sort of cornice to be scrambled over (and loose nails to be avoided), and then more careful steering with legs and toes to keep on one particular face of the steeple and not swing off and come b.u.mping back, a disconcerting possibility. "h.e.l.lo!" called Lawlor presently, from above. "You're doing fine. Come right along." And before I knew it the swing had stopped. I was at the top, or as near it as the tackle could take me. The remaining fifteen feet or so must be made with stirrups. And there was Lawlor standing in them up by the ball. There was not a stick of staging to support him (he had scorned the bother of hauling up boards for so simple a job), and he was working with both hands free, each leg standing on its stirrup, and several hitches of life-line holding him to the shaft top by his waist.

This steeple-la.s.soing exploit was one of the things I certainly would not attempt--would not and could not.

Strangely enough, as I hung here at rest I felt the danger more than coming up. It seemed most perilous to rest my weight on the swing-board, and I found myself holding my legs drawn up, with muscles tense, as if that could make me lighter. Gradually I realized the foolishness of this, and relaxed into greater comfort, but not entirely. Even veteran steeple-climbers waste much strength in needless clutching; cannot free their bodies from this instinctive fear.

I stayed up long enough to take three photographs (some minutes pa.s.sed before I could unlash my kodak), and here I had further proof of subconscious fright, for I made such blunders with shutter and focus length as would put the youngest amateur to shame. Two pictures out of the three were failures, and the third but an indifferent success. There is one thing to be said in extenuation, that a steeple is never still, but always rocking and trembling. When Lawlor changed his stirrup hitches or moved from side to side the old beams would groan under us, and the whole structure rock. "She'd rock more," said Lawlor, "if she was better built. A good steeple always rocks."

There wasn't much more to say or do up here, and presently we exchanged jerks on the line for the descent. And Lawlor cried: "Lower away! Hang on, now!" And I did over again my humble part of leg-spreading and toe-steering, with the result that presently I was down on the "bell-deck" again, receiving congratulations.

"Here's your knife," said Merrill, after he had unlashed me.

"What did you take it for?" I asked.

"Oh, men sometimes get a mania to cut the ropes when they go up the first time. And that isn't good for their health. I was pretty sure you'd keep your head, but I wasn't taking any chances."

After this came thanks and warm hand-grips all around, and then I left these daring men to their duties, and went down the lower ladders. I am sure I never appreciated the simple privilege of standing on a sidewalk as I did, a few minutes later, when I left the Church of the Pilgrims and came out into the pleasant autumn sunshine.

THE DEEP-SEA DIVER

I

SOME FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF MEN WHO GO DOWN UNDER THE SEA

IN old South Street, far down on the New York river-front, is a gloomy brick building with black fire-escapes zigzagging across its face, and a life-size diver painted over its door, in red helmet and yellow goggle-eyes, to the awe and admiration of the young--to the awe and admiration of anybody who comes through this wicked-looking street by night, and smells the sea, and stares along miles of ships' noses that reach right over the car-tracks, and finally stops at the black-lettered announcement that wrecks are looked after here day or night, and mysteries of the deep penetrated by gentlemen of the diving profession in just such gigantic suits as this painted one.

None of this had I noticed, late one night (being occupied with the silent, hungry ships, and the fire-cars trailing over the dim bridge), until a brisk banjo-strumming caught my ear, and I paused at the house of wrecks, whence the sounds came. Somebody back in these moldering shadows was playing the "Turkish Patrol," and playing it remarkably well.

I followed the light down a narrow pa.s.sage, and presently came upon the modern wrecker, in the person of Benjamin F. Bean, a large man smoking contentedly at a table whereon rested a telephone and phonograph. The phonograph was playing the "Turkish Patrol," and a single incandescent lamp, swinging overhead, illumined the scene. There were coils of rope about, and photographs of vessels in distress, and a bunk with tumbled sheets at one side, where Mr. Bean slept, often with his clothes on, while awaiting the ring of sundry danger-bells.

Divers fully expect to be objects of curiosity, for never do they work except before wondering audiences; so this one found my visit natural enough--was glad, I think, to talk a little and let the phonograph rest.

It must be rather lonely, after all, watching for wrecks hour after hour, night after night, listening always for footsteps (the officer's tramp or the thug's stealthy tread), listening always to the hoot of pa.s.sing vessels, listening always for bad news.

He explained to me what happens when the bad news comes, say a collision up the Hudson, a ferry-boat on fire down the bay, a line of barges sunk in the Sound, any one of a dozen ordinary disasters. In olden times such tidings must have traveled from mouth to mouth, and the wreckers of those days flashed their calls and warnings with beacon-fires. Now electricity does all this much better with the click of a key; and presently somebody, somewhere, has the office at the end of a wire telling what the trouble is, and forthwith the man in charge puts machinery in motion that will change this trouble into cash. _Br-r-r-r_ calls the telephone; up spring messenger-boys in distant all-night stations, and in half an hour door-bells are ringing in Harlem or Jersey City, and the men who ought to know things know them, and whistles are sounding on big pontoons that can lift two hundred tons, and sleepy men are tumbling out of their bunks, and great chains are clanking, and tug-boats are sputtering forth for the towing of sundry hoisting-and pumping-craft that go splashing along to the danger-spot with all appliances aboard, pneumatic, hydraulic, not to mention savory hot coffee served to the divers and the crew.

Most divers are poor story-tellers (perhaps because the marvelous grows commonplace to them from over-indulgence in it), but the stories are there in their lives, if only you can dig them out. I asked Bean if he often went down himself, and found that he was still in active service, after twenty-odd years of it, which certainly had agreed with him. He was just back from a sad errand in Pennsylvania. A boy had gone swimming in a slate-quarry, and been drowned; they had dragged for him, and fired cannon over the water, but nothing had availed, and so, finally, a diver was sent for from the city, the diver being Bean. The quarry was a great chasm four or five hundred feet deep, with eighty feet of water filling various galleries and rock shelves, in one of which the poor lad had been caught and held. The question was in which one.

"Well," said Bean, coming abruptly to the end, "I went down and got him."

That was his way of telling the story: he "went down and got him." There was nothing more to say; nothing about the two days' perilous search through every tunnel and recess of those rocky walls; nothing about the three thousand excited people who crowded around the quarry's mouth, awaiting the issue, nor the scene when that pitiful burden was hauled up from the depths.

I asked Bean if he had ever been in great danger while under the water.

"Nothing special," he said, and then added, after thinking: "Once I had my helmet twisted off."

[Ill.u.s.tration: PORTRAIT OF A DIVER. DRAWN FROM LIFE.]

"What, below?"

He nodded.

"How can a diver live with his helmet off?"

"He can't, usually. 'T was just luck they got me up in time. They say my face was black as a coal." And he had no more to tell of this adventure.

With few exceptions, divers take their career in exactly this phlegmatic, matter-of-fact way. I fancy a man of vivid imagination would break under the strain of such a life. Yet often divers will go into great details about some little incident, as when Bean described the hoisting of a certain boiler sunk outside of Sandy Hook. It had been on a tug-boat of such a name, it was so many feet long and wide, and other things about the tide and the steam-derrick, and what the captain said, the point being that this boiler had acted as an enormous trap for the blackfish, of which they had found some hundreds of big ones splashing about inside, unable to escape.

So our talk ran on, and all the time I was thinking how I would like to see these things for myself. And it came to pa.s.s, as the subject kept its hold on me, that I did see them. Indeed, I spent a whole summer month--and found zest in it beyond ordinary summer pleasurings--in observing the practical operations of diving and wrecking as they go on in the waters about New York. I discovered other wrecking companies, notably one on West Street, and from the head man here learned many things. He took me out on a pier one day, where one of his crews was rescuing thirty thousand dollars' worth of copper buried under the North River. Every few minutes, with a _chunk-chunk_ of the engine and a rattle of chains, the dredge would bring up a fistful of mud (an iron fist, holding a ton or so) and slap it down on the deck, where a strong hose-stream would wash out little canvas bags of copper ore, each worth a ten-dollar bill in the market.

"This will show you," said the expert, "what a diver has to contend with at the bottom of a river. He often sinks four or five feet in the mud, just as those bags sink, and sometimes the mud suction holds him down so hard that three men pulling on the life-line can scarcely budge him. And when the mud lets go the diver comes out of it like a cork from a bottle. You can feel him flop over, clean tuckered out with kicking and working his arms. They let him lie there a minute or two to rest, and then pull him up. Why, vessels will sink ten or twelve feet in the mud, so that the diver has to take a hose down, and wash a tunnel out below the keel, to get a lifting-chain under."

"Wash a tunnel out?" I inquired.

"That's what they do. You know how you can bore a hole in a sand-bank, don't you, with a stream of water? Well, it's just the same with a mud-bank down below, only you need more pressure. Sometimes we use a stream of compressed air. The diver steers the hose just as a fireman steers the fire-hose, and once in a while gets knocked over by the force of it, just as a fireman does."

Tunneling mud-banks under water, with streams of water or streams of compressed air, struck me as decidedly a novelty. I was to hear of stranger things ere long.

My guide presently pointed out a splendidly built young man who was shoveling mud off the deck, not far from us.

"There," said he, "is a case that ill.u.s.trates the worst of this business. That fellow is made to be a diver; he's intelligent, he's not afraid, and he can stand having the suit on; he's been down two or three times and done easy jobs of patching. If he'd keep straight for a year or two, he could earn his ten dollars a day with the best of them. But he won't keep straight. The poor fellow drinks. We can't depend on him.

And here he is, shoveling mud for a dollar and a quarter a day, and no steady work at that."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "THE DIVER'S HELMET SHOWED LIKE THE BACK OF A BIG TURTLE."]

Ten dollars a day seemed a handsome wage, and I asked if divers generally earn so much.