The Chief had salvaged him out of the Hudson, when what he had taken for a bobbing red tomato had suddenly revealed a blue face and two set and desperate eyes. After that the big Scot had forgotten all about him, except the next day when he put on his shoes, which had shrunk in the drying. The liner finished coaling about that time, took on passengers, luggage, steamer baskets and a pilot, and, having stowed the first two, examined the cards on the third and dropped the last, was pointed, nose to the east wind, for the race.
The arrow on the twin dials pointed to Stand By! for the long voyage—three thousand miles or so without a stop. The gong, and then Half Ahead!—great elbows thrust up and down, up and down; the grunt of power overcoming inertia, followed by the easy swing of limitless strength. Full Ahead!—and so off again for the great struggle—man's wits and the engines and the mercy of God against the upreaching of the sea.
The Chief, who sometimes dreamed his greatness, but who ignored it waking, snapped his watch shut.
"Eleven-eleven!" he said to the Senior Second. "Well, here's luck!" That is what he said aloud; to himself he always said a bit of a prayer, realising perhaps even more than the bridge how little man's wits count in the great equation. He generally said something to the effect that "After all, it's up to Thee, O Lord!"
He shook hands with the Senior Second, which also was his habit; and he smiled too, but rather grimly. They were playing a bit of a game, you see; and so far the Chief had won all the tricks—just an amusing little game and nothing whatever to do with a woman; the Second was married, but the Chief had put all such things out of his head years before, when he was a youngster and sailing to the Plate. Out of his head, quite certainly; but who dreams of greatness for himself alone? So the Chief, having glanced about and run his hand caressingly over various fearful and pounding steel creatures, had climbed up the blistering metal staircase to his room at the top and was proceeding to put down eleven-eleven and various other things that the first cabin never even heard of, when he felt that he was being stared at from behind.
Now and then, after shore leave, a drunken trimmer or stoker gets up to the Chief's room and has to be subdued by the power of executive eye or the strength of executive arm. As most Chiefs are Scots, the eye is generally sufficient. So the Chief, mightily ferocious, turned about, eye set, as one may say, to annihilate a six-foot trimmer in filthy overalls and a hangover, and saw—a small red-haired boy in a Turkish towel.
The boy quailed rather at the eye, but he had the courage of nothing to lose—not even a pair of breeches—and everything to gain.
"Please," said the apparition, "the pilot's gone, and you can't put me off!"
The Chief opened his mouth and shut it again. The mouth, and the modification of an eye set for a six-foot trimmer to an eye for a four-foot-ten urchin in a Turkish towel, produced a certain softening. The Red Un, who was like the Chief in that he earned his way by pitting his wits against relentless Nature, smiled a little—a surface smile, with fear just behind.
"The Captain's boy's my size; I could wear his clothes," he suggested.
Now, back in that time when the Chief had kept a woman's picture in his breast pocket instead of in a drawer of his desk, there had been small furtive hopes, the pride of the Scot to perpetuate his line, the desire of a man for a manchild. The Chief had buried all that in the desk drawer with the picture; but he had gone overboard in his best uniform to rescue a wharf-rat, and he had felt a curious sense of comfort when he held the cold little figure in his arms and was hauled on deck, sputtering dirty river water and broad Scotch, as was his way when excited.
"And where ha' ye been skulking since yesterday?" he demanded.
"In the bed where I was put till last night. This morning early——" he hesitated.
"Don't lie! Where were ye?"
"In a passenger's room, under a bed. When the passengers came aboard I had to get out."
"How did ye get here?"
This met with silence. Quite suddenly the Chief recognised the connivance of the crew, perhaps, or of a kindly stewardess.
"Who told you this was my cabin?" A smile this time, rather like the Senior Second's when the Chief and he had shaken hands.
"A nigger!" he said. "A coloured fella in a white suit."
There was not a darky on the boat. The Red Un, whose code was the truth when possible, but any lie to save a friend—and that's the code of a gentleman—sat, defiantly hopeful, arranging the towel to cover as much as possible of his small person.
"You're lying! Do you know what we do with liars on this ship? We throw them overboard!"
"Then I'm thinking," responded the Turkish towel, "that you'll be needing another Chief Engineer before long!"
Now, as it happened, the Chief had no boy that trip. The previous 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 b
eard, 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 g
rime 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 Best of Mary Roberts Rinehart Page 436