Love Stories Part 44

The Senior cursed. Then he turned abruptly and climbed the steel ladder he had just descended. The Junior, who was antic.i.p.ating a shower and bed, stared after him.

The Senior thought quickly--that was why he was a Senior. He found the Red Un's cabin and hammered at the door. Then, finding it was not locked, he walked in. The Red Un lay perched aloft; the shirt of his small pajamas had worked up about his neck and his thin torso lay bare. In one hand he clutched the dead end of a cigarette. The Senior wakened him by running a forefinger down his ribs, much as a boy runs a stick along a paling fence.

"Wha' ish it?" demanded the Red Un in sleepy soprano. And then "Wha'

d'ye want?" in ba.s.s. His voice was changing; he sounded like two people in animated discussion most of the time.

"You boys want to earn a sovereign?"

The Purser's boy, who had refused to rouse to this point, sat up in bed.

"Whaffor?" he asked.

"Get the Chief here some way. You"--to the Purser's boy--"go and tell him the Red Un's ill and asking for him. You"--to the Red Un--"double up; cry; do something. Start him off for the doctor--anything, so you keep him ten minutes or so!"

The Red Un was still drowsy, and between sleeping and waking we are what we are.

"I won't do it!"

The Senior Second held out a gold sovereign on his palm.

"Don't be a bally little a.s.s!" he said.

The Red Un, waking full, now remembered that he hated the Chief; for fear he did not hate him enough, he recalled the lifebelt, and his legs, and the girl laughing.

"All right!" he said. "Gwan, Pimples! What'll I have?

Appendiceetis?"

"Have a toothache," snapped the Senior Second. "Tear off a few yells--anything to keep him!"

It worked rather well; plots have a way of being successful in direct proportion to their iniquity. Beneficent plots, like loving relatives dressed as Santa Claus, frequently go wrong; while it has been shown that the leakiest sort of scheme to wreck a bank will go through with the band playing.

The Chief came and found the Red Un in agony, holding his jaw. Owing to the fact that he lay far back in an upper bunk, it took time to drag him into the light. It took more time to get his mouth open; once open, the Red Un pointed to a snag that should have given him trouble if it didn't, and set up a fresh outcry.

Not until long after could the Red Un recall without shame his share in that night's work--recall the Chief, stubby hair erect, kind blue eyes searching anxiously for the offending tooth. Recall it? Would he ever forget the arm the Chief put about him, and him: "Ou-ay!

laddie; it's a weeked snag!"

The Chief, to whom G.o.d had denied a son of his flesh, had taken Red Un to his heart, you see--fatherless wharf-rat and childless engineer; the man acting on the dour Scot principle of chastening whomsoever he loveth, and the boy cherishing a hate that was really only hurt love.

And as the Chief, who had dragged the Red Un out of eternity and was not minded to see him die of a toothache, took him back to his cabin the pain grew better, ceased, turned to fright. The ten minutes or so were over and what would they find? The Chief opened the door; he had in mind a drop of whisky out of the flask he never touched on a trip--whisky might help the tooth.

On the threshold he seemed to scent something amiss. He glanced at the ceiling over his bunk, where the airtrunk lay, and then--he looked at the boy. He stooped down and put a hand on the boy's head, turning it to the light.

"Tell me now, lad," he said quietly, "did ye or did ye no ha' the toothache?"

"It's better now," sullenly.

"Did ye or did ye no?"

"No."

The Chief turned the boy about and pushed him through the doorway into outer darkness. He said nothing. Down to his very depths he was hurt. To have lost the game was something; but it was more than that. Had he been a man of words he might have said that once again a creature he loved had turned on him to his injury. Being a Scot and a man of few words he merely said he was d.a.m.ned, and crawled back into bed.

The game? Well, that was simple enough. Directly over his pillow, in the white-painted airtrunk, was a bra.s.s plate, fastened with four screws. In case of anything wrong with the ventilator the plate could be taken off for purposes of investigation.

The Chief's scheme had been simplicity itself--so easy that the Seconds, searching for concealed wires and hidden alarm bells, had never thought of it. On nights when the air must be pumped, and officious Seconds were only waiting the Chief's first sleep to shut off steam and turn it back to the main engines, the Chief unlocked the bolted drawer in his desk. First he took out the woman's picture and gazed at it; quite frequently he read the words on the back--written out of a sore heart, be sure. And then he took out the cigar-box lid.

When he had unscrewed the bra.s.s plate over his head he replaced it with the lid of the cigar-box. So long as the pumps in the engine room kept the air moving, the lid stayed up by suction.

When the air stopped the lid fell down on his head; he roused enough to press a signal b.u.t.ton and, as the air started viciously, to replace the lid. Then, off to the sleep of the just and the crafty again. And so on _ad infinitum_.

Of course the game was not over because it was discovered and the lid gone. There would be other lids. But the snap, the joy, was gone out of it. It would never again be the same, and the worst of all was the manner of the betrayal.

He slept but little the remainder of the night; and, because unrest travels best from soul to soul at night, when the crowding emotions of the day give it place, the woman slept little also. She was thinking of the entrance to the stokehole, where one crouched under the bellies of furnaces, and where the engineer on duty stood on a pile of hot cinders. Toward morning her room grew very close: the air from the ventilator seemed to have ceased.

Far down in the ship, in a breathless little cabin far aft, the Red Un kicked the Purser's boy and cried himself to sleep.

V

The old ship made a record the next night that lifted the day's run to four hundred and twenty. She was not a greyhound, you see.

Generally speaking, she was a nine-day boat. She averaged well under four hundred miles. The fast boats went by her and slid over the edge of the sea, throwing her bits of news by wireless over a shoulder, so to speak.

The little girl's mother was not a good sailor. She sat almost all day in a steamer chair, reading or looking out over the rail. Each day she tore off the postal from the top of her menu and sent it to the girl's father. She missed him more than she had expected. He had become a habit; he was solid, dependable, loyal. He had never heard of the Chief.

"Dear Daddy," she would write: "Having a splendid voyage so far, but wish you were here. The baby is having such a good time--so popular; and won two prizes to-day at the sports! With love, Lily."

They were all rather like that. She would drop them in the mailbox, with a tug of tenderness for the man who worked at home. Then she would go back to her chair and watch the sea, and recall the heat of the engine room below, and wonder, wonder----

It had turned warm again; the edges of the horizon were grey and at night a low mist lay over the water. Rooms were stifling, humid. The Red Un discarded pajamas and slept in his skin. The engine-room watch came up white round the lips and sprawled over the boat deck without speech. Things were going wrong in the Red Un's small world.

The Chief hardly spoke to him--was grave and quiet, and ate almost nothing. The Red Un hated himself unspeakably and gave his share of the sovereign to the Purser's boy.

The Chief was suffering from lack of exercise in the air as well as other things. The girl's mother was not sleeping--what with heat and the memories the sea had revived. On the fifth night out, while the ship slept, these two met on the deck in the darkness--two shadows out of the past. The deck was dark, but a ray from a window touched his face and she knew him. He had not needed light to know her; every line of her was written on his heart, and for him there was no one at home to hold in tenderness.

"I think I knew you were here all the time," she said, and held out both hands.

The Chief took one and dropped it. She belonged to the person at home. He had no thought of forgetting that!

"I saw your name on the pa.s.senger list, but I have been very busy."

He never lapsed into Scotch with her; she had not liked it. "Is your husband with you?"

"He could not come just now. I have my daughter."

Her voice fell rather flat. The Chief could not think of anything to say. Her child, and not his! He was a one-woman man, you see--and this was the woman.

"I have seen her," he said presently. "She's like you, Lily."

That was a wrong move--the Lily; for it gave her courage to put her hand on his arm.

"It is so long since we have met," she said wistfully. "Yesterday, after I saw the--the place where you lived and--and work----" She choked; she was emotional, rather weak. Having made the situation she should have let it alone; but, after all, it is not what the woman is, but what the man thinks she is.