Chapter 16

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."