Love Stories Part 41

"Aw, gwan!" he said to the Captain's boy. "Where'd you and your Old Man be but for us? In a blasted steel tank, floating about on the bloomin' sea! What's a ship without insides?"

The Captain's boy, who was fourteen, and kept his bath sponge in a rubber bag, and shaved now and then with the Captain's razor, retorted in kind.

"You fellows below think you're the whole bally ship!" he said loftily. "Insides is all right--we need 'em in our business. But what'd your steel tank do, with the engines goin', if she wasn't bein' navigated? Steamin' in circles, like a tinklin'

merry-go-round!"

It was some seconds after this that the Purser, a well-intentioned but interfering gentleman with a beard, received the kick that put him in dry dock for two days.

II

They were three days out of New York on the Red Un's second round trip when the Second, still playing the game and almost despairing, made a strategic move. The Red Un was laying out the Chief's luncheon on his desk--a clean napkin for a cloth; a gla.s.s; silver; a plate; and the menu from the first-cabin dining saloon. The menu was propped against a framed verse:

_But I ha' lived and I ha' worked!

All thanks to Thee, Most High._

And as he placed the menu, the Red Un repeated the words from McAndrew's hymn. It had rather got him at first; it was a new philosophy of life. To give thanks for life was understandable, even if unnecessary. But thanks for work! There was another framed card above the desk, more within the Red Un's ken: "Cable crossing! Do not anchor here!"

The card worked well with the first cla.s.s, resting in the Chief's cabin after the arduous labours of seeing the engines.

The Chief was below, flat on his back in a manhole looking for a staccato note that did not belong in his trained and orderly chorus.

There was grease in his sandy hair, and the cranks were only a few inches from his nose. By opening the door the Red Un was able to command the cylinder tops, far below, and the fiddley, which is the roof of h.e.l.l or a steel grating over the cylinders to walk on--depending on whether one is used to it or not. The Chief was naturally not in sight.

This gave the Red Un two minutes' leeway--two minutes for exploration. A drawer in the desk, always heretofore locked, was unfastened--that is, the bolt had been shot before the drawer was entirely closed. The Red Un was jealous of that drawer. In two voyages he had learned most of the Chief's history and, lacking one of his own, had appropriated it to himself. Thus it was not unusual for him to remark casually, as he stood behind the Chief's chair at dinner: "We'd better send this here postcard to Cousin Willie, at Edinburgh."

"Ou-ay!" the Chief would agree, and tear off the postcard of the ship that topped each day's menu; but, so far, all hints as to this one drawer had been futile; it remained the one barrier to their perfect confidence, the fly in the ointment of the Red Un's content.

Now, at last---- Below, a drop of grease in the Chief's eye set him wiping and cursing; over his head hammered, banged and lunged his great babies; in the stokehole a gaunt and grimy creature, yclept the Junior Second, stewed in his own sweat and yelled for steam.

The Red Un opened the drawed quickly and thrust in a hand. At first he thought it was empty, working as he did by touch, his eye on the door. Then he found a disappointing something--the lid of a cigar-box! Under that was a photograph. Here was luck! Had the Red Un known it, he had found the only two secrets in his Chief's open life. But the picture was disappointing--a snapshot of a young woman, rather slim, with the face obscured by a tennis racket, obviously thrust into the picture at the psychological moment. Poor spoil this--a cigar-box lid and a girl without a face! However, marred as it was, it clearly meant something to the Chief. For on its reverse side was another stanza from McAndrew's hymn:

_Ye know how hard an idol dies, An' what that meant to me-- E'en tak' it for a sacrifice Acceptable to Thee._

The Red Un thrust it back into the drawer, with the lid. If she was dead what did it matter? He was a literal youth--so far, his own words had proved sufficient for his thoughts; it is after thirty that a man finds his emotions bigger than his power of expressing them, and turns to those that have the gift. The Chief was over thirty.

It was as he shut the drawer that he realised he was not alone. The alley door was open and in it stood the Senior Second. The Red Un eyed him unpleasantly.

"Sneaking!" said the Second.

"None of your blamed business!" replied the Red Un.

The Second, who was really an agreeable person, with a sense of humour, smiled. He rather liked the Red Un.

"Do you know, William," he observed--William was the Red Un's name--"I'd be willing to offer two shillings for an itemised account of what's in that drawer?"

"Fill it with shillings," boasted the Red Un, "and I'll not tell you."

"Three?" said the Second cheerfully.

"No."

"Four?"

"Why don't you look yourself?"

"Just between gentlemen, that isn't done, young man. But if you volunteered the information, and I saw fit to make you a present of, say, a pipe, with a box of tobacco----"

"What do you want to know for?"

"I guess you know."

The Red Un knew quite well. The Chief and the two Seconds were still playing their game, and the Chief was still winning; but even the Red Un did not know how the Chief won--and as for the two Seconds and the Third and the Fourth, they were quite stumped.

This was the game: In bad weather, when the ports are closed and first-cla.s.s pa.s.sengers are yapping for air, it is the province of the engine room to see that they get it. An auxiliary engine pumps cubic feet of atmosphere into every cabin through a series of airtrunks.

So far so good. But auxiliaries take steam; and it is exceedingly galling to a Junior or Senior, wagering more than he can afford on the run in his watch, to have to turn valuable steam to auxiliaries--"So that a lot of blooming nuts may smoke in their bunks!" as the Third put it.

The first move in the game is the Chief's, who goes to bed and presumably to sleep. After that it's the engine-room move, which gives the first cla.s.s time to settle down and then shuts off the airpumps. Now there is no noise about shutting off the air in the trunks. It flows or it does not flow. The game is to see whether the Chief wakens when the air stops or does not. So far he had always wakened.

It was uncanny. It was worse than that--it was d.a.m.nable! Did not the Old Man sleep at all?--not that he was old, but every Chief is the Old Man behind his back. Everything being serene, and the engine-room clock marking twelve-thirty, one of the Seconds would shut off the air very gradually; the auxiliary would slow down, wheeze, pant and die--and within two seconds the Chief's bell would ring and an angry voice over the telephone demand what the several kinds of perdition had happened to the air! Another trick in the game to the Chief!

It had gone past joking now: had moved up from the uncanny to the impossible, from the impossible to the enraging. Surrept.i.tious search of the Chief's room had shown nothing but the one locked drawer. They had taken advantage of the Chief's being laid up in Antwerp with a boil on his neck to sound the cabin for hidden wires.

They had asked the ship's doctor anxiously how long a man could do without sleep. The doctor had quoted Napoleon.

"If at any time," observed the Second pleasantly, "you would like that cigarette case the barber is selling, you know how to get it."

"Thanks, old man," said the Red Un loftily, with his eye on the wall.

The Second took a step forward and thought better of it.

"Better think about it!"

"I was thinking of something else," said the Red Un, still staring at the wall. The Second followed his eye. The Red Un was gazing intently at the sign which said: "Cable crossing! Do not anchor here!"

As the Second slammed out, the Chief crawled from his manhole and struggled out of his greasy overalls. Except for his face, he was quite tidy. He ran an eye down the port tunnel, where the shaft revolved so swiftly that it seemed to be standing still, to where at the after end came the racing of the screw as it lifted, bearded with scud, out of the water.

"It looks like weather to-night," he observed, with a twinkle, to the Fourth. "There'll aye be air wanted." But the Fourth was gazing at a steam gauge.

III

The Red Un's story, like all Gaul, is divided into three parts--his temptation, his fall and his redemption. All lives are so divided: a step back; a plunge; and then, in desperation and despair, a little climb up G.o.d's ladder.

Seven days the liner lay in New York--seven days of early autumn heat, of blistering decks, of drunken and deserting trimmers, of creaking gear and grime of coal-dust. The cabin which held the Red Un and the Purser's boy was breathless. On Sunday the four ship's boys went to Coney Island and lay in the surf half the afternoon.

The bliss of the water on their thin young legs and scrawny bodies was Heaven. They did not swim; they lay inert, letting the waves move them about, and out of the depths of a deep content making caustic comments about the human form as revealed by the relentless sea.

"That's a pippin!" they would say; or, "My aunt! looks at his legs!"