Chapter 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.