Love Stories Part 43

"True," said the Captain gloomily.

"I was thinkin'," remarked the Chief diffidently--one hates to think before the Captain; that's always supposed to be his job.

"Yes?"

"That we could make a verra fine example of them and still retain their services. Ha' ye, by chance, seen a crow hangin' head down in the field, a warnin' to other mischief-makers?"

"Ou-ay!" said the Captain, who had a Scotch mother. The line wavered again; the Captain's boy, who pulled his fingers when he was excited, cracked three knuckles.

"It would be good deescipline," continued the Chief, "to stand the four o' them in ship's belt at the gangway, say for an hour, morning and evening--clad, ye ken, as they were during the said infreengements."

"You're a great man, Chief!" said the Captain. "You hear that, lads'?"

"With--with no trousers'?" gasped the Doctor's boy.

"If you wore trousers last night. If not----"

The thing was done that morning. Four small boys, clad only in ship's belts, above which rose four sheepish heads and freckled faces, below which shifted and wriggled eight bare legs, stood in line at the gangway and suffered agonies of humiliation at the hands of crew and dockmen, grinning customs inspectors, coalpa.s.sers, and a newspaper photographer hunting a human-interest bit for a Sunday paper. The cooks came up from below and peeped out at them; the ship's cat took up a position in line and came out in the Sunday edition as "a fellow conspirator."

The Red Un, owing to an early training that had considered clothing desirable rather than essential, was not vitally concerned. The Quartermaster had charge of the line; he had drawn a mark with chalk along the deck, and he kept their toes to it by marching up and down in front of them with a broomhandle over his shoulder.

"Toe up, you little varmints!" he would snap. "G.o.d knows I'd be glad to get a rap at you--keeping an old man down in the water half the night! Toe up!"

Whereupon, aiming an unlucky blow at the Purser's boy, he hit the Captain's cat. The line snickered.

It was just after that the Red Un, surmising a snap by the photographer on the dock and thwarting it by putting his thumb to his nose, received the shock of his small life. The little girl from Coney Island, followed by her mother, was on the pier--was showing every evidence of coming up the gangway to where he stood. Was coming! Panic seized the Red Un--panic winged with flight. He turned--to face the Chief. Appeal sprang to the Red Un's lips.

"Please!" he gasped. "I'm sick, sick as h--, sick as a dog, Chief.

I've got a pain in my chest--I----"

Curiously enough, the Chief did not answer or even hear. He, too, was looking at the girl on the gangway and at her mother. The next moment the Chief was in full flight, ignominious flight, his face, bleached with the heat of the engine room and the stokehole, set as no emergency of broken shaft or flying gear had ever seen it. Broken shaft indeed! A man's life may be a broken shaft.

The woman and the girl came up the gangway, exidently to inspect staterooms. The Quartermaster had rallied the Red Un back to the line and stood before him, brandishing his broomhandle. Black fury was in the boy's eye; hate had written herself on his soul. His Chief had ignored his appeal--had left him to his degradation--had deserted him.

The girl saw the line, started, blushed, recognised the Red Un--and laughed!

IV

The great voyage began--began with the band playing and much waving of flags and display of handkerchiefs; began with the girl and her mother on board; began with the Chief eating his heart out over coal and oil vouchers and well soundings and other things; began with the Red Un in a new celluloid collar, lying awake at night to hate his master, adding up his injury each day to greater magnitude.

The voyage began. The gong rang from the bridge. Stand By! said the twin dials. Half Ahead! Full Ahead! Full Ahead! Man's wits once more against the upreaching of the sea! The Chief, who knew that somewhere above was his woman and her child, which was not his, stood under a ventilator and said the few devout words with which he commenced each voyage:

"With Thy help!" And then, snapping his watch: "Three minutes past ten!"

The chief engineer of a liner is always a gentleman and frequently a Christian. He knows, you see, how much his engines can do and how little. It is not his engines alone that conquer the sea, nor his engines plus his own mother wit. It is engines plus wit plus _x_, and the _x_ is G.o.d's mercy. Being responsible for two quant.i.ties out of the three of the equation, he prays--if he does--with an eye on a gauge and an ear open for a cylinder knock.

There was gossip in the engineers' mess those next days: the Old Man was going to pieces. A man could stand so many years of the strain and then where was he? In a land berth, growing fat and paunchy, and eating his heart out for the sea, or---- The sea got him one way or another!

The Senior Second stood out for the Chief.

"Wrong with him? There's nothing wrong with him," he declared. "If he was any more on the job than he is I'd resign. He's on the job twenty-four hours a day, nights included."

There was a laugh at this; the mess was on to the game. Most of them were playing it.

So now we have the Red Un looking for revenge and in idle moments lurking about the decks where the girl played. He washed his neck under his collar those days.

And we have the Chief fretting over his engines, subduing drunken stokers, quelling the frequent disturbances of h.e.l.l Alley, which led to the firemen's quarters, eating little and smoking much, devising out of his mental disquietude a hundred possible emergencies and--keeping away from the pa.s.sengers. The Junior Second took down the two parties who came to see the engine room and gave them lemonade when they came up. The little girl's mother came with the second party and neither squealed nor asked questions--only at the door into the stokeholes she stood a moment with dilated eyes. She was a little woman, still slim, rather tragic. She laid a hand on the Junior's arm.

"The--the engineers do not go in there, do they?"

"Yes, madam. We stand four-hour watches. That is the Senior Second Engineer on that pile of cinders."

The Senior Second was entirely black, except for his teeth and the whites of his eyes. There was a little trouble in a coalbunker; they had just discovered it. There would be no visitors after this until the trouble was over.

The girl's mother said nothing more. The Junior Second led them around, helping a pretty young woman about and explaining to her.

"This," he said, smiling at the girl, "is a pump the men have nicknamed Marguerite, because she takes most of one man's time and is always giving trouble."

The young woman tossed her head.

"Perhaps she would do better if she were left alone," she suggested.

The girl's mother said nothing, but, before she left, she took one long look about the engine room. In some such bedlam of noise and heat _he_ spent his life. She was wrong, of course, to pity him; one need not measure labour by its conditions or by its cost, but by the joy of achievement. The woman saw the engines--sinister, menacing, frightful; the man saw power that answered to his hand--conquest, victory. The beat that was uproar to her ears was as the throbbing of his own heart.

It was after they had gone that the Chief emerged from the forward stokehole where the trouble was. He had not seen her; she would not have known him, probably, had they met face to face. He was quite black and the light of battle gleamed in his eyes.

They fixed the trouble somehow. It was fire in a coalbunker, one of the minor exigencies. Fire requiring air they smothered it one way and another. It did not spread, but it did not quite die. And each day's run was better than the day before.

The weather was good. The steerage, hanging over the bow, saw far below the undercurling spray, white under dark blue--the blue growing paler, paler still, until the white drops burst to the top and danced free in the sun. A Greek, going home to Crete to marry a wife, made all day long tiny boats of coloured paper, weighted with corks, and sailed them down into the sea.

"They shall carry back to America my farewells!" he said, smiling.

"This to Pappas, the bootblack, who is my friend. This to a girl back in America, with eyes--behold that darkest blue, my children; so are her eyes! And this black one to my sister, who has lost a child."

The first cla.s.s watched the spray also--as it rose to the lip of a gla.s.s.

Now at last it seemed they would break a record. Then rain set in, without enough wind to make a sea, but requiring the starboard ports to be closed. The Senior Second, going on duty at midnight that night, found his Junior railing at fate and the airpumps going.

"Shut 'em off!" said the Senior Second furiously.

"Shut 'em off yourself. I've tried it twice."

The Senior Second gave a lever a vicious tug and the pump stopped.

Before it had quite lapsed into inertia the Chief's bell rang.

"Can you beat it?" demanded the Junior sulkily. "The old fox!"