The Second Class Passenger Part 47

At Barcelona the Captain went to hospital and they took off his right arm at the shoulder. The Burdock went back without him, and he lay in his bed wondering how it was that the loss of an arm should make a man feel lonely.

He was quickly about again. His body was clean from the bone out, clean and hard, and he had never been ill. When the time came to take a walk, he arrayed himself in sh.o.r.e-going black. It cost him an infinity of trouble and more than an hour of the morning to dress himself with one hand, but he would not have help. Then it was that he discovered a strange thing; it was his right arm, the arm that was gone, that hindered him. The scars of the amputation had healed, but unless he bore the fact deliberately in mind, he felt the arm to be there. He tried to b.u.t.ton his braces with it, to knot his tie, to lace his boots, and had to overtake the impulse and correct it with an effort. When his clothes were on, he put his right hand in his trousers pocket, then remembered that it was not there, and withdrew hastily the hand he had not got. During the walk the same trouble remained with him; it muddled him when he bought tobacco and tried to pick up the change. Before he slept that night, he dropped on his knees at his bedside, and folded the left hand of flesh against the right hand of dreamstuff in prayer.

When his time came to go home in the Burdock, he was an altered man.

The quiet, all-observant scrutiny had gone, and the officers who greeted him as he came up the accommodation ladder saw it at once.

Arthur Price was now in command, a breezy, good-looking captain in blue serge and gold braid.

"You've got her, then, Arthur?" said the old man, as he reached the deck and stood looking about him.

"Yes, I've got her," answered his son. "That your kit, father? Sewell (to the chief mate), send a couple of hands to get that dunnage aboard. Come along below, father."

He tucked his arm into his father's and led him down. Mildly taking stock of the well-remembered surroundings, the old man noticed he was being taken to the Captain's state-room, and an impulse of grat.i.tude moved him. But he was glad he did not speak of it when his son put aside the curtains at the door for him, and he saw that this was not to be his room. New chintzes took the place of his old leather cushions; a big photograph of Minnie stood on the lid of the chronometer case, and the broken-backed Admiralty guides, ocean directories and the rest were reinforced by a brigade of smartly bound novels.

"Sit down," said Arthur, "and make yourself at home till they get your dunnage in. I've put you in the spare cabin in the port alleyway; you'll find it nice and quiet there. How are you feeling, father? Would you care for a drink?"

"Yes, I'd like a tot," replied the old man. "Shall I ring for your steward?"

"Don't you trouble," said Arthur. "I've got it here." It was in the cupboard under the chronometer, a whole case of whisky. "I carry my own," explained the mate; "I don't believe in old Davis's taste in whisky. Help yourself, father."

"How is Minnie?" asked the old man as he set down his gla.s.s.

"She's all right," was the reply. "I wanted to tell you about that.

We go into dry dock when we get back from this trip, and Minnie and I'll get married before I take her out again. Quick work, isn't it?"

The old Captain nodded; the young Captain smiled.

"You'll be bringing Minnie out for the trip, I suppose?" asked the elder.

"That's my idea," agreed Arthur.

"You're a lucky chap," said the old man slowly. He hesitated. "You've got your ship in hand, eh, Arthur?"

"I've got her down to a fine point," said Arthur emphatically. "You needn't bother about me, father. I know my job, and I don't need more teaching. I wish you'd get to understand that. You know Davis has bought the Stormberg?"

"I didn't know," said the old man with a sigh. "It don't matter to me, anyhow. I'd be reaching for the engine telegraph with my right hand as like as not. No, Arthur, I've done. I'll bother young officers no more."

The run home was an easy one, but it confirmed old Captain Price in his resolution to have done with the sea. Two or three times he fell about decks; a small roll, the commonplace movement of a well-driven steamship in a seaway shook him from his balance, and that missing arm, which always seemed to be there, let him down. He would reach for a stanchion with it to steady himself, and none of his falls served to cure him of the persistent delusion that he was not a cripple. He tried to pick things up with it, and let gla.s.ses and the like fall every day. The officers and engineers, men who had sailed with him at his ablest, saw his weakness quickly, and, with the ready tact that comes to efficient seafarers, never showed by increased deference or any sign that they were conscious of the change. It was only Arthur who went aside to make things easy for him, to cut his food for him at table, and so forth.

From Swansea he went home by train; Minnie and her kindly old father met him and made much of him. Old Davis was a man who had built up his own fortune, sc.r.a.ping tonnage together bit by bit, from the time when, as a captain, he had salved a crazy derelict and had her turned over to him by the underwriters in quittance of his claims. Now he owned a little fleet of good steamships of respectable burthen, and was an esteemed owner. He did not press the Stormberg on Captain Price. The two old men understood each other.

"I don't want her," Captain Price told him. "There's a time for nursin' tender engines and a time for sc.r.a.ppin' them. I'm for the sc.r.a.p heap, David. I'm not the man I was. I don't put faith in myself no more. It's Arthur's turn now."

David Davis nodded. "Yes, then. Well, well, now! It's a pity, too, John. But you know what's best, to be sure. I don't want you to go without a ship while I've got a bottom afloat, but I don't want you to put the Stormberg to roost on the rocks of Lundy neither. So you wouldn't put faith in yourself no more!"

"No," said Captain Price, frowning reflectively "I wouldn't, and that's the truth." He was seated in a plush-covered arm-chair in Davis's parlour, and now he leaned forward. "It's this arm of mine.

It isn't there, but I can't get rid of the feeling of it. I'm always reachin' for things with it. I'd be reachin' for the telegraph in a hurry, I make no doubt."

"That's funny," said Davis, in sympathy. "Well, then, you just stop visiting with me. I've no mind to be alone in the house when your Arthur's gone off with my Minnie. He'll push the Burdock back an'

fore for us, and we'll sit ash.o.r.e like gentlemen. He makes a good figure of a skipper, don't he, John?"

Old Captain Price sighed. "Aye, he looks well on the bridge," he said. "I hope he'll watch the ship, though; she's a big old tub to handle."

He saw the Burdock into dry dock and strolled down each day to look at her. Minnie and Arthur were busy with preparations for the wedding. But the girl found time to go down once with the old man, and he took her into the dock under the steamship.

"A big thing she looks from here," he said, half to himself.

The girl looked forward. Over them the bottom plates of the Burdock made a great sloping roof; her rolling chocks stood out like galleries. Her lines bulged heavily out, and the girl saw the immensity of the great fabric, the power of the tool her husband should wield.

"She's big, indeed," she answered. "Five thousand tons and forty lives in one man's hands. It's splendid, uncle. And Arthur," her voice softened pleasantly, "is the man."

The old Captain wheeled on her sharply. "Tons and lives!" he cried.

"Tons and lives be d.a.m.ned! It's not for them she's been run to a thumb-span and tended like a sick baby. It's for the clean honesty of it, to do a captain's work like a wise captain and not soil a record.

D'ye think I stump my bridge for forty-eight hours on end because of the underwriters and the deck hands? Not me, my girl, not me! It's my trade to lay her sweetly in Barcelona bay, and it's my honor to know my work and do it."

He seemed to shrug his shoulder. The girl could not know it was his right hand he flung up to the scarred steel plates above him.

"There's your Burdock," he said. "She's your dividend-grinder; she's my ship. And if I'd thought of no more than your five thousand tons and your forty lives, she'd not be where she is."

He held out his left hand, palm uppermost, and started and blinked when there came no smack of the right fist descending into it.

"There's me talking again," he said. "Never mind, Minnie dear, it's only your old uncle. Let's be back up town."

The wedding day was a Thursday. The ceremony was to take place in the chapel of which David Davis was a member; the subsequent festivities were arranged for at an hotel. It wag to be a notable affair, an epochmaker in the local shipping world, and when all was over there would be time for the newly-wedded to go aboard the Burdock and take her out on the tide. Old Captain Price, decorous in stiff black, drove to the church with his son in a two-horse brougham. Neither spoke a word till they were close to the chapel door. Then the old man burst out suddenly.

"For G.o.d's sake, Arthur boy, do the right thing by your ship."

Arthur Price was a little moved. "I will, father," he said. "Here's my hand on it." There was a pause. "Why don't you take my hand, father?" he asked.

"Eh?" The old man started. "I thought I'd took it, Arthur. I'll be going soft next. Here's the other hand for you."

The reception at the hotel and the breakfast there were notable affairs. Everybody who counted for anything with the hosts were there, and after a little preliminary formality and awkwardness the function grew to animation. The shipping folk of Cardiff know champagne less as a beverage than as a symbol, and there was plenty of it. Serious men became frivolous; David Davis made a speech in Welsh; Minnie glowed and blossomed; Arthur was everybody's friend.

The old Captain, seated at the bottom of the table with an iron-clad matron on one side and a bored reporter on the other, watched him with a groan. The man who was to take the Burdock out of dock was drinking. Even one gla.s.s at such a time would have breached the old man's code; it was a crime against shipmastership. But Arthur, with his bride beside him, her brown eyes alight, her shoulder against his shoulder, had gone much further than the one gla.s.s. The exhilaration of the day dazzled him; a waiter with a bottle to refill his gla.s.s was ever at his shoulder. His voice rattled on untiringly; already the old man saw how the muscles or the jaw were slack and the eyes moved loosely. The young Captain hid a toast to respond to; he swayed as he stood up to speak, and his tongue stumbled on his consonants.

The reporter on Captain Price's left offered him champagne at the moment.

"Take it away," rumbled the old man. "Swill it yourself."

The pressman nodded. "It is pretty shocking stuff," he agreed. "I'm going nap on the coffee myself."

It came to a finish at last. The bride went up to change, and old Captain Price took a cab to the docks. The Burdock was smart in new paint, and even the deck hands had been washed for the occasion.

"I'll go down with you a bit," he explained to Sewell, the chief mate. "The pilot'll bring me back. I suppose I can go up to the chart-house?"

"Of course, sir," said Sewell. "If you can't go where you like aboard of us, who can?"

The old man smiled. "That'll be for the Captain to say," he answered, and went up the ladder.

She was very smart, the old Burdock, and Arthur had made changes in the chart-house, but she had the same feel for her old Captain. Under her paint and frills, the steel of her structure was unaltered; the old engines would heave her along; the old seas conspire against her.

Shift and bedeck and bedrape her as they might, she was yet the Burdock; her lights would run down the Channel with no new consciousness in their stare, and there was work and peril for men aboard of her as of old.