one had been adopted after the last trip by a childless couple who
had liked the shape of his nose and the way his eyelashes curled on
his cheek. The Chief looked at the Red Un; it was perfectly clear
that no one would ever adopt him for the shape of his nose, and he
apparently lacked lashes entirely. He rose and took a bathrobe from
a hook on the door.
"Here," he said; "cover your legs wi' that, and say a prayer if ye'
know wan. The Captain's a verra hard man wi' stowaways."
The Captain, however, who was a gentleman and a navigator and had a
sense of humour also, was not hard with the Red Un. It being
impracticable to take the boy to him, the great man made a special
visit to the boy. The Red Un, in the Chief's bathrobe, sat on a
chair, with his feet about four inches from the floor, and returned
the Captain's glare with wide blue eyes.
"Is there any reason, young man, why I shouldn't order you to the
lockup for the balance of this voyage?" the Captain demanded, extra
grim, and trying not to smile.
"Well," said the Red Un, wiggling his legs nervously, "you'd have to
feed me, wouldn't you? And I might as well work for my keep."
This being a fundamental truth on which most economics and all
governments are founded, and the Captain having a boy of his own at
home, he gave a grudging consent, for the sake of discipline, to the
Red Un's working for his keep as the Chief's boy, and left. Outside
the door he paused.
"The little devil's starved," he said. "Put some meat on those
ribs, Chief, and - be a bit easy with him!"
This last was facetious, the Chief being known to have the heart of
a child.
So the Red Un went on the payroll of the line, and requisition was
made on the storekeeper for the short-tailed coat and the long
trousers, and on the barber for a hair-cut. And in some curious way
the Red Un and the Chief hit it off. It might have been a matter of
red blood or of indomitable spirit.
Spirit enough and to spare had the Red Un. On the trip out he had
licked the Captain's boy and the Purser's boy; on the incoming trip
he had lashed the Doctor's boy to his triumphant mast, and only
three days before he had settled a row in the stokehole by putting
hot ashes down the back of a drunken trimmer, and changing his
attitude from menace with a steel shovel to supplication and prayer.
He had no business in the stokehole, but by that time he knew every
corner of the ship - called the engines by name and the men by
epithets; had named one of the pumps Marguerite, after the Junior
Second's best girl; and had taken violent partisanship in the
eternal rivalry of the liner between the engine room and the bridge.
"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 glass; 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 class, 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 hell 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-class passengers 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 class 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 damnable! 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. Surreptitious
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 God'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!"
They voiced their opinions audibly and were ready to back them up
with flight or fight.
It was there that the Red Un saw the little girl. She had come from
a machine, and her mother stood near. She was not a Coney Islander.
She was first-cabin certainly - silk stockings on her thin ankles,
sheer white frock; no jewelry. She took a snapshot of the four
boys - to their discomfiture - and walked away while they were still
writhing.
"That for mine!" said the Red Un in one of his rare enthusiasms.
They had supper - a sandwich and a glass of beer; they would have
preferred pop, but what deep-water man on shore drinks pop? - and
made their way back to the ship by moonlight. The Red Un was terse
in his speech on the car: mostly he ate peanuts abstractedly. If he
evolved any clear idea out of the chaos of his mind it was to wish
she had snapped him in his uniform with the brass buttons.
The heat continued; the men in the stokehole, keeping up only enough
steam for the dynamos and donkey engines, took turns under the
ventilators or crawled up to the boatdeck at dusk, too exhausted to
dress and go ashore. The swimmers were overboard in the cool river
with the first shadows of night; the Quartermaster, so old that he
dyed his hair for fear he'd be superannuated, lowered his lean body
hand over hand down a rope and sat by the hour on a stringpiece of
the dock, with the water laving his hairy and tattooed old breast.
The Red Un was forbidden the river. To be honest, he was rather
relieved - not twice does a man dare the river god, having once been
crowned with his slime and water-weed. When the boy grew very hot
he slipped into a second-cabin shower, and stood for luxurious
minutes with streams running off his nose and the ends of his
fingers and splashing about his bony ankles.
Then, one night, some of the men took as many passengers' lifebelts
and went in. The immediate result was fun combined with safety; the
secondary result was placards over the ship and the dock, forbidding
the use of the ship's lifebelts by the crew.
From that moment the Red Un was possessed for the river and a
lifebelt. So were the other three. The signs were responsible.
Permitted, a ship's lifebelt was a subterfuge of the cowardly,
white-livered skunks who were afraid of a little water; forbidden, a
ship's lifebelt took on the qualities of enemy's property - to be
reconnoitred, assaulted, captured and turned to personal advantage.
That very night, then, four small bodies, each naked save for a
lifebelt, barrelshaped and extending from breast almost to knee,
slipped over the side of the ship with awkward splashes and
proceeded to disport themselves in the river. Scolding tugs sent
waves for them to ride; ferries crawled like gigantic bugs with a
hundred staring eyes. They found the Quartermaster on a stringpiece
immersed to the neck and smoking his pipe, and surrounded him - four
small, shouting imps, floating barrels with splashing hands and
kicking feet.
"Gwan, ye little devils!" said the Quartermaster, clutching the
stringpiece and looking about in the gloom for a weapon. The Red Un,
quite safe and audacious in his cork jacket, turned over on his back
and kicked.
"Gwan yerself, Methuselah!" he sang.
They stole the old man's pipe and passed it from mouth to mouth;
they engaged him in innocent converse while one of them pinched his
bare old toe under water, crab-fashion. And at last they prepared to
shin up the rope again and sleep the sleep of the young, the
innocent and the refreshed.
The Chief was leaning over the rail, just above, smoking!
He leaned against the rail and smoked for three hours! Eight eyes,
watching him from below, failed to find anything in his face but
contemplation; eight hands puckered like a washerwoman's; eight feet
turned from medium to clean, from clean to bleached - and still the
Chief smoked on. He watched the scolding tugs and the ferryboats
that crawled over the top of the water; he stood in rapt
contemplation of the electric signs in Jersey, while the ship's
bells marked the passage of time to eternity, while the
Quartermaster slept in his bed, while the odours of the river stank
in their nostrils and the pressure of the ship's lifebelts weighed
like lead on their clammy bodies.
At eight bells - which is midnight - the Chief emptied his
twenty-fourth pipe over the rail and smiled into the gloom beneath.
"Ye'll better be coming up," he remarked pleasantly. "I'm for
turning in mysel'."
He wandered away; none of the watch was near. The ship was dark,
save for her riding lights. Hand over puckered hand they struggled
up and wriggled out of the belts; stark naked they ducked through
passageways and alleys, and stowed their damp and cringing forms
between sheets.
The Red Un served the Chief's breakfast the next morning very
carefully. The Chief's cantaloupe was iced; his kipper covered with
a hot plate; the morning paper propped against McAndrew's hymn. The
Red Un looked very clean and rather bleached.
The Chief was busy; he read the night reports, which did not amount
to much, the well soundings, and a letter from a man offering to
show him how to increase the efficiency of his engines fifty per
cent, and another offering him a rake-off on a new lubricant.
Outwardly the Chief was calm - even cold. Inwardly he was rather
uncomfortable: he could feel two blue eyes fixed on his back and
remembered the day he had pulled them out of the river, and how
fixed and desperate they were then. But what was it McAndrew said?
"Law, order, duty an' restraint, obedience, discipline!"
Besides, if the boys were going to run off with the belts some
damned first-class passenger was likely to get a cabin minus a belt
and might write to the management. The line had had bad luck; it did
not want another black eye. He cleared his throat; the Red Un
dropped a fork.
"That sort of thing last night won't do, William."
"N-No, sir."
"Ye had seen the signs, of course?"
"Yes, sir." The Red Un never lied to the Chief; it was useless.
The Chief toyed with his kipper.
"Ye'll understand I'd ha' preferred dealin' with the matter mysel';
but it's - gone up higher."
The Quartermaster, of course! The Chief rose and pretended to glance
over the well soundings.
"The four of ye will meet me in the Captain's room in fifteen
minutes," he observed casually.
The Captain was feeding his cat when the Red Un got there. The four
boys lined up uncomfortably; all of them looked clean, subdued,
apprehensive. If they were to be locked up in this sort of weather,
and only three days to sailing time - even a fine would be better.
The Captain stroked the cat and eyed them.
"Well," he said curtly, "what have you four young imps been up to
now?"
The four young imps stood panicky. They looked as innocent as choir
boys. The cat, eating her kipper, wheezed.
"Please, sir," said the Captain's boy solicitously, "Peter has
something in his throat."
"Perhaps it's a ship's lifebelt," said the Captain grimly, and
caught the Chief's eye.
The line palpitated; under cover of its confusion the Chief,
standing in the doorway with folded arms, winked swiftly at the
Captain; the next moment he was more dour than ever.
"You are four upsetters of discipline," said the Captain, suddenly
pounding the table. "You four young monkeys have got the crew by the
ears, and I'm sick of it! Which one of you put the fish in Mrs.
Schmidt's bed?"
Mrs. Schmidt was a stewardess. The Red Un stepped forward.
"Who turned the deckhose into the Purser's cabin night before last?"
"Please," said the Doctor's boy pallidly, "I made a mistake in the
room. I thought - - "
"Who," shouted the Captain, banging again, "cut the Quartermaster's
rope two nights ago and left him sitting under the dock for four
hours?"
The Purser's boy this time, white to the lips! Fresh panic seized
them; it could hardly be mere arrest if he knew all this; he might
order them hanged from a yardarm or shot at sunrise. He looked like
the latter. The Red Un glanced at the Chief, who looked apprehensive
also, as if the thing was going too far. The Captain may have read
their thoughts, for he said:
"You're limbs of Satan, all of you, and hanging's too good for you.
What do you say, Chief? How can we make these young scamps lessons
in discipline to the crew?"
Everybody breathed again and looked at the Chief - who stood tall and
sandy and rather young to be a Chief - in the doorway.
"Eh, mon," he said, and smiled, "I'm aye a bit severe. Don't ask me
to punish the bairns."
The Captain sniffed.
"Severe!" he observed. "You Scots are hard in the head, but soft in
the disposition. Come, Chief - shall they walk the plank?"
"Good deescipline," assented the Chief, "but it would leave us a bit
shorthanded."
"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, coalpassers, 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. "God 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 God's mercy. Being responsible for two quantities 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 Hell 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 passengers. 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 class watched the spray also - as it rose to the lip of a
glass.
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!"
The Senior cursed. Then he turned abruptly and climbed the steel
ladder he had just descended. The Junior, who was anticipating 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 bass. 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 ass!" 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 God 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 damned, and crawled
back into bed.
The game? Well, that was simple enough. Directly over his pillow, in
the white-painted airtrunk, was a brass 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 brass 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 button 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 passenger 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,