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 lap
sed 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 Best of Mary Roberts Rinehart Page 437