Hammer and Anvil Part 55

I say happily, for it was ill with me in both head and heart. The death of my father, who had died without my being able even once to press his stern honorable hand, the meeting with my sister who put her children out of my way as if they were endangered by my presence, the prospect of the future which looked all the darker the more I thought over it--all this would have completely overwhelmed me had not the honest furnace been there in which the coals glowed so splendidly and the flames danced so merrily, while the st.u.r.dy engine worked on manfully and unresting. Only free work can make us free, my teacher had said to me. I had believed him at his word, but to-day for the first time I comprehended it, as I felt how the hard work which I had here to perform lightened more and more the load upon my heart, and the clouds pa.s.sed away from my brow.

A kind of joyful pride took hold of me as I felt myself at home here; and I thought of that day eight years' before when I took that fateful trip on the _Penguin_ and visited my friend Klaus in the engine-room, and to my wine-heated brain the engine appeared a machine only fit to crush the life out of me. The good Klaus! He had trouble enough with me that day, and care enough about me; and I should give him both trouble and care now if I should go to him to learn with his help to be a good workman. Some care I should give him, not much; I had found out this morning that I could stand more firmly on my own feet than I had supposed.

Far more firmly than my present superior, the bearded engineer, stood upon his. He stood by no means firmly, the honest fellow, and his watery eyes as well as the sleepy expression of his far from handsome face, and the vulgar perfume of alcohol which he diffused about him, made it obvious that his unsteady gait was not altogether due to the rolling of the boat. The worthy man was not exactly drunk--a regular engineer is never drunk, even though he sits up to two or three in the morning in a tavern drinking Swedish punch with his colleagues from the Swedish mailboat--but neither was he sober; so far from it that I on my side began to look at my superior with suspicious looks when, standing by his lever, he sank into deep meditation, which often bore a striking resemblance to a peaceful slumber.

"A warming-plate wanted on the forward deck; quick, Herr Weiergang!"

called the steward down to the engine-room. Herr Weiergang nodded at me: it was a matter that concerned me especially. I knew what was wanted. I had been often enough on steamboats in rough weather when the motion of the boat rendered it impossible for those ladies who readily suffered from sea-sickness to remain in the cabin, and the sharp north-east wind and the spray made the exposure upon deck disagreeable and sometimes intolerable. Intolerable, if the honest fireman were not at hand with plates of iron cast especially for this purpose, which he has heated on the boiler and obligingly places under their half-frozen feet.

To-day I was the honest fireman. It struck me rather oddly; in all my life I had never done this service; had never dreamed that I should ever have to perform it. Had I to do it then? Certainly: I had undertaken the duty of the injured man, and this was part of his duty.

So in five minutes I was on deck, holding a well-heated iron in my hands, which I had protected by a bunch of oak.u.m.

It was now about noon, and the first time I had been on deck. The atmosphere was gray and dense with mist; one could scarcely see a hundred paces ahead. The wind was contrary, so that, though it was not violent, the boat pitched heavily, and a cold fine spray from the waves that broke against the bow swept continually over the deck.

The deck was nearly deserted, or at least seemed so, as the ten or twenty pa.s.sengers were crouching in every corner, behind the paddle-boxes, the deck-cabin, and wherever any projection offered a little shelter.

"Here, my friend, here!" cried a voice that had a familiar sound to me, and turning suddenly around, I gave so violent a start that I had nearly dropped the plate. There stood a man, who, though he had now a gray old-fashioned overcoat with wide sleeves over his blue frock-coat with gold b.u.t.tons, and wore his cap not pushed back from his forehead, as usual, but pulled down over his eyes--could be no other than my old friend Commerzienrath Streber.

"Here, my friend!" he cried again, and pointed with his right hand, while with his left he held fast to the capstan, to a lady crouching with her back towards me upon a low chair behind a great coil of cable at the bow of the vessel. The lady drew a large plaid cloak, lined with some soft and fine material, close around her slender figure, and turned her face, which was framed in a swan's-down hood, towards me.

It was a sweet lovely girlish face, upon whose cheeks the sea-breeze had kissed the delicate pink to a bright glow, and whose deep-blue brilliant eyes contrasted singularly with the gray water and the gray air. It had been seven years since I saw this face last. The child had become a maiden; but the maiden had still the face, or at least the mouth and eyes of the child, and by this mouth and these eyes I knew her. I started involuntarily and had to grasp the plate firmly to save it from falling on the wet deck, while I felt the blood rushing to my cheeks. It was certainly a severe trial to appear before the maiden who had been my little friend in other days, in such a costume, and with a face embrowned with soot.

But this dress and this sooty covering were what saved me; she looked up at me with a little surprise but without recognizing me.

"Lay it here, my friend," she said, leaning back a little in her chair, and raising the edge of her skirt a little, so that I had a glimpse of the daintiest little feet in the world, resting on their heels to keep them from the wet deck.

I kneeled, and did what was required, no more and no less; perhaps rather less than more, for she said:

"You can bring me another by and by, if you have time; you do not seem to have time just now."

"Yes; and bring one for me at once!" cried the commerzienrath.

"And for me, if I may venture to ask," cried a thin voice from a corner between the deck-house and the mast, where out of some half-dozen shawls and wrappings peeped out a red nose, and in the wind fluttered a yellow curl which could belong to no one but Fraulein Amalie Duff.

"And for me!" "And for me!" cried a half-dozen other voices from as many other piles of m.u.f.flings, whose owners, with the promptness of desperation, had comprehended the advantage of a hot iron plate on a wet deck.

"But for me first!" screamed the commerzienrath, getting alarmed at the compet.i.tion. "You know who I am, don't you?"

I did not deem it necessary to a.s.sure the Herr Commerzienrath that I knew him more than well enough, and hastened away from the deck, which was getting hotter to me than my furnace. I went below in a very unenviable frame of mind, and the thought that presently I must go on deck again brought great beads of perspiration to my forehead; but when I thought the matter over I found that my agitation was merely occasioned by very ordinary vanity. I hated to appear before the pretty girl as a sooty monster--this it was and nothing more; and while I was thus thinking as I stood by the boiler, the plates upon it had long reached the needful temperature, and the steward had called down three times to know if I was not ready with those confounded irons.

"Be ashamed of yourself!" I said to myself; "the poor things up there are freezing because you happen to have on a ragged blouse, and a patch or two of soot on your face. Shame upon you!"

And I was ashamed of myself, and went up the ladder and boldly marched direct to the place where the poor half-frozen governess was crouching in her wet wrappings.

Raising her water-blue eyes to me with the expression of helpless misery, she said, while her teeth chattered with cold, "You good man, you are my preserver!"

"Why do you not stay in the cabin?" I asked. I had no need to speak in _Platt-Deutsch_, or to disguise my voice, which either the sharp north-easter, or my embarra.s.sment, or both together, made unnaturally deep and rough.

"I should die down there!" moaned the poor creature.

"Then sit over there by the paddle-box, where you have some shelter.

You have here the worst place on the whole deck."

"O you good man!" said the governess. "It is indeed an eternal truth that there are good men in every clime."

I had to bite my lips.

"Can I a.s.sist you?" I said. "If you do not mind my working-dress----"

"'Among monsters the only feeling breast,'" murmured the governess, hanging on my arm.

"Where are you going, dear Duff?" cried a joyous voice behind us, and Hermine, who had sprung from her seat, came running up, apparently to help her friend, but if this was her intention, she could not carry it out for laughing. She clapped her hands and laughed until her white teeth glittered between her red lips. "Pluto and Proserpine!" she cried. "Duffchen, Duffchen, I always said they would carry you off from me some day!"

And she danced about the wet deck in wild glee, just as she had danced with her little spaniel about the deck of the _Penguin_ eight years before.

"Are you ever coming to me, you fellow?" cried the commerzienrath, who, squeezed into a corner, had watched my attentions to the governess with very ill-pleased looks.

"There are two ladies here yet," I said.

"But I called you first," he cried, stamping with impatience.

"Ladies must always be served first, Herr Commerzienrath," smilingly remarked the captain, who was coming aft from the forward deck.

"O, you can talk: you are used to this abominable cold," growled the commerzienrath.

I went below again, but not to stay long. The cry for warm plates had grown general, and a hard job I had of it to satisfy the impatient clamors from all quarters. The weather had in the mean time grown rougher, and the fog increased in density. I observed that the captain's jovial face grew graver and graver, and once I heard him say to a pa.s.senger who had the appearance of a seafaring man:

"If we were only well out of the cursed channel once. With this wind the largest ships can come in; and we can not see a hundred paces ahead."

I knew enough of seamanship fully to comprehend the captain's uneasiness; and I had another anxiety of my own besides.

My superior, namely, the engineer Weiergang, had visibly with every hour sunk deeper and deeper into meditation upon the felicities attending the copious indulgence in Swedish punch; and though he still mechanically stood at his post and performed his duties about the engine, where now, as the vessel was going steadily ahead, there was but little to do, I still did not leave the engine-room without considerable uneasiness. How easily might it happen that the narrowness of the channel should render a complicated man[oe]uvre necessary, and was the nodding figure there in a condition to carry it out?

I had gone on deck with another plate, intended for no other than the blue-eyed, vivacious beauty. She had resumed her old place at the bow, and gave me a friendly nod as I approached.

"I give you a great deal of trouble," she said.

"No trouble at all," I answered, with a bow.

"Are you from Uselin?" she asked, while I arranged the plate.

"No," I muttered, about to take a hasty departure.

"But you speak our _Platt_." she said quickly, and looked sharply at me with a surprised expression.

I felt that the coating of soot on my cheeks must be very thick indeed to hide the flush which I felt burning in my cheeks.

"Ship in sight!" suddenly shouted the man at the foretop.