‘I think I deserve twenty-five per cent, don’t I, at least?’ he said, with beautiful frankness. ‘I supplied all the ideas, didn’t I?’
This greediness for silver was a new side in his nature. I assumed that it had been developed in the City, where Charlie was picking up the curious nasal drawl of the underbred City man.
‘When the thing’s done we’ll talk about it. I can’t make anything of it at present. Red-haired or black-haired heroes are equally difficult.’
He was sitting by the fire staring at the red coals. ‘I can’t understand what you find so difficult. It’s all as clear as mud to me,’ he replied. A jet of gas puffed out between the bars, took light, and whistled softly. ‘Suppose we take the red-haired hero’s adventures first, from the time that he came south to my galley and captured it and sailed to the Beaches.’
I knew better now than to interrupt Charlie. I was out of reach of pen and paper, and dared not move to get them lest I should break the current. The gas-jet puffed and whinnied, Charlie’s voice dropped almost to a whisper, and he told a tale of the sailing of an open galley to Furdurstrandi, of sunsets on the open sea, seen under the curve of the one sail evening after evening when the galley’s beak was notched into the centre of the sinking disc, and ‘we sailed by that, for we had no other guide,’ quoth Charlie. He spoke of a landing on an island and explorations in its woods, where the crew killed three men whom they found asleep under the pines. Their ghosts, Charlie said, followed the galley, swimming and choking in the water, and the crew cast lots and threw one of their number overboard as a sacrifice to the strange gods whom they had offended. Then they ate seaweed when their provisions failed, and their legs swelled, and their leader, the red-haired man, killed two rowers who mutinied, and after a year spent among the woods they set sail for their own country, and a wind that never failed carried them back so safely that they all slept at night. This and much more Charlie told. Sometimes the voice fell so low that I could not catch the words, though every nerve was on the strain. He spoke of their leader, the red-haired man, as a pagan speaks of his God; for it was he who cheered them and slew them impartially as he thought best for their needs; and it was he who steered them for three days among floating ice, each floe crowded with strange beasts that ‘tried to sail with us’, said Charlie, ‘and we beat them back with the handles of the oars.’
The gas-jet went out, a burnt coal gave way, and the fire settled with a tiny crash to the bottom of the grate. Charlie ceased speaking, and I said no word.
‘By Jove!’ he said at last, shaking his head. ‘I’ve been staring at the fire till I’m dizzy. What was I going to say?’
‘Something about the galley book.’
‘I remember now. It’s twenty-five per cent of the profits, isn’t it?’
‘It’s anything you like when I’ve done the tale.’
‘I wanted to be sure of that. I must go now. I’ve – I’ve an appointment.’ And he left me.
Had not my eyes been held I might have known that that broken muttering over the fire was the swan-song of Charlie Mears. But I thought it the prelude to fuller revelation. At last and at last I should cheat the Lords of Life and Death!
When next Charlie came to me I received him with rapture. He was nervous and embarrassed, but his eyes were very full of light, and his lips a little parted.
‘I’ve done a poem,’ he said; and then, quickly: ‘It’s the best I’ve ever done. Read it.’ He thrust it into my hand and retreated to the window.
I groaned inwardly. It would be the work of half an hour to criticise – that is to say, praise – the poem sufficiently to please Charlie. Then I had good reason to groan, for Charlie, discarding his favourite centipede metres,29 had launched into shorter and choppier verse, and verse with a motive at the back of it. This is what I read:
‘The day is most fair, the cheery wind
Halloos behind the hill,
Where he bends the wood as seemeth good,
And the sapling to his will!
Riot, O wind; there is that in my blood
That would not have thee still!
‘She gave me herself, O Earth, O Sky;
Grey sea, she is mine alone!
Let the sullen boulders hear my cry,
And rejoice tho’ they be but stone!
‘Mine! I have won her, O good brown Earth,
Make merry! ’Tis hard on Spring;
Make merry – my love is doubly worth
All worship your fields can bring!
Let the hind that tills you feel my mirth
At the early harrowing!’
‘Yes, it’s the early harrowing, past a doubt,’ I said, with a dread at my heart. Charlie smiled, but did not answer.
‘Red cloud of the sunset, tell it abroad;
I am victor. Greet me, O Sun,
Dominant master and absolute lord
Over the soul of one!’
‘Well?’ said Charlie, looking over my shoulder.
I thought it far from well, and very evil indeed when he silently laid a photograph on the paper – the photograph of a girl with a curly head and a foolish slack mouth.
‘Isn’t it – isn’t it wonderful?’ he whispered, pink to the tips of his ears, wrapped in the rosy mystery of first love. ‘I didn’t know. I didn’t think. It came like a thunderclap.’
‘Yes. It comes like a thunderclap. Are you very happy, Charlie?’
‘My God, – she – she loves me!’ He sat down repeating the last words to himself. I looked at the hairless face, the narrow shoulders already bowed by desk-work, and wondered when, where, and how he had loved in his past lives.
‘What will your mother say?’ I asked cheerfully.
‘I don’t care a damn what she says!’
At twenty the things for which one does not care a damn should, properly, be many, but one must not include mothers in the list. I told him this gently; and he described Her, even as Adam must have described to the newly-named beasts the glory and tenderness and beauty of Eve. Incidentally I learned that She was a tobacconist’s assistant with a weakness for pretty dress, and had told him four or five times already that She had never been kissed by a man before.
Charlie spoke on and on, and on; while I, separated from him by thousands of years, was considering the beginnings of things. Now I understood why the Lords of Life and Death shut the doors so carefully behind us. It is that we may not remember our first and most beautiful wooings. Were this not so, our world would be without inhabitants in a hundred years.
‘Now, about that galley-story,’ I said still more cheerfully, in a pause in the rush of the speech.
Charlie looked up as though he had been hit. ‘The galley – what galley? Good heavens, don’t joke, man! This is serious! You don’t know how serious it is!’
Grish Chunder was right. Charlie had tasted the love of woman that kills remembrance, and the finest story in the world would never be written.
THE SHIP THAT FOUND HERSELF
We now, held in captivity,
Spring to our labour nor grieve!
See now, how it is blesseder,
Brothers, to give than receive!
Keep trust, wherefore ye were made,
Paying the duty ye owe;
For a clean thrust and the sheer of the blade
Shall carry us where we should go.
Song of the Engines.
It was her first voyage, and though she was but a cargo-steamer of twelve hundred tons, she was the very best of her kind, the outcome of forty years of experiments and improvements in framework and machinery; and her designers and owner thought as much of her as though she had been the Lucania.1 Any one can make a floating hotel that will pay expenses if he puts enough money into the saloons, and charges for private baths, suites of rooms, and such-like; but in these days of competition and low freights every square inch of a cargo-boat must be built for cheapness, great hold-capacity, and a certain steady speed. This boat was, perhaps, two
hundred and forty feet long and thirty-two feet wide, with arrangements that enabled her to carry cattle on her main and sheep on her upper deck if she wanted to; but her great glory was the amount of cargo that she could store away in her holds. Her owners – they were a very well-known Scotch firm – came round with her from the North, where she had been launched and christened and fitted, to Liverpool, where she was to take cargo for New York; and the owner’s daughter, Miss Frazier, went to and fro on the clean decks, admiring the new paint and the brass-work, and the patent winches, and particularly the strong, straight bow, over which she had cracked a bottle of champagne when she named the steamer the Dimbula. It was a beautiful September afternoon, and the boat in all her newness – she was painted lead-colour with a red funnel – looked very fine indeed. Her house-flag was flying, and her whistle from time to time acknowledged the salutes of friendly boats, who saw that she was new to the High and Narrow Seas and wished to make her welcome.
‘And now,’ said Miss Frazier delightedly, to the captain, ‘she’s a real ship, isn’t she? It seems only the other day Father gave the order for her, and now – and now – isn’t she a beauty!’ The girl was proud of the firm, and talked as though she were the controlling partner.
‘Oh, she’s no so bad,’ the skipper replied cautiously. ‘But I’m sayin’ that it takes more than christenin’ to mak’ a ship. In the nature o’ things, Miss Frazier, if ye follow me, she’s just irons and rivets and plates put into the form of a ship. She has to find herself yet.’
‘I thought Father said she was exceptionally well found.’2
‘So she is,’ said the skipper, with a laugh. ‘But it’s this way wi’ ships, Miss Frazier. She’s all here, but the parrts of her have not learned to work together yet. They’ve had no chance.’
‘The engines are working beautifully. I can hear them.’
‘Yes, indeed. But there’s more than engines to a ship. Every inch of her, ye’ll understand, has to be livened up and made to work wi’ its neighbour – sweetenin’ her, we call it, technically.’
‘And how will you do it?’ the girl asked.
‘We can no more than drive and steer her, and so forth; but if we have rough weather this trip – it’s likely – she’ll learn the rest by heart! For a ship, ye’ll obsairve, Miss Frazier, is in no sense a reegid body closed at both ends. She’s a highly complex structure o’ various an’ conflictin’ strains, wi’ tissues that must give an’ tak’, accordin’ to her perrsonal modulus of elasteecity.’ Mr Buchanan, the chief engineer, was coming towards them. ‘I’m sayin’ to Miss Frazier here that our little Dimbula has to be sweetened yet, and nothin’ but a gale will do it. How’s all wi’ your engines, Buck?’
‘Well enough – true by plumb an’ rule, o’ course; but there’s no spontaneeity yet.’ He turned to the girl. ‘Take my word, Miss Frazier, and maybe ye’ll comprehend later; even after a pretty girl’s christened a ship it does not follow that there’s such a thing as a ship under the men that work her.’
‘I was sayin’ the very same, Mr Buchanan,’ the skipper interrupted.
‘That’s more metaphysical than I can follow,’ said Miss Frazier, laughing.
‘Why so? Ye’re good Scotch, an’ – I knew your mother’s father, he was fra’ Dumfries – ye’ve a vested right in metapheesics, Miss Frazier, just as ye have in the Dimbula,’ the engineer said.
‘Eh, well, we must go down to the deep watters, an’ earn Miss Frazier her deevidends. Will you not come to my cabin for tea?’ said the skipper. ‘We’ll be in dock the night, and when you’re goin’ back to Glasgie ye can think of us loadin’ her down an’ drivin’ her forth – all for your sake.’
In the next few days they stowed some two thousand tons’ dead weight into the Dimbula, and took her out from Liverpool. As soon as she met the lift of the open water, she naturally began to talk. If you lay your ear to the side of the cabin the next time you are in a steamer, you will hear hundreds of little voices in every direction, thrilling and buzzing, and whispering and popping, and gurgling and sobbing and squeaking exactly like a telephone in a thunderstorm. Wooden ships shriek and growl and grunt, but iron vessels throb and quiver through all their hundreds of ribs and thousands of rivets. The Dimbula was very strongly built, and every piece of her had a letter or number, or both, to describe it; and every piece had been hammered, or forged, or rolled, or punched by man, and had lived in the roar and rattle of the shipyard for months. Therefore, every piece had its own separate voice in exact proportion to the amount of trouble spent upon it. Cast-iron, as a rule, says very little; but mild steel plates and wrought-iron, and ribs and beams that have been much bent and welded and riveted, talk continuously. Their conversation, of course, is not half as wise as our human talk, because they are all, though they do not know it, bound down one to the other in a black darkness, where they cannot tell what is happening near them, nor what will overtake them next.
As soon as she had cleared the Irish coast a sullen, grey-headed old wave of the Atlantic climbed leisurely over her straight bows, and sat down on the steam-capstan used for hauling up the anchor. Now the capstan and the engine that drove it had been newly painted red and green; besides which, nobody likes being ducked.
‘Don’t you do that again,’ the capstan sputtered through the teeth of his cogs. ‘Hi! Where’s the fellow gone?’
The wave had slouched overside with a plop and a chuckle; but ‘Plenty more where he came from,’ said a brother-wave, and went through and over the capstan, who was bolted firmly to an iron plate on the iron deck-beams below.
‘Can’t you keep still up there?’ said the deck-beams. ‘What’s the matter with you? One minute you weigh twice as much as you ought to, and the next you don’t!’
‘It isn’t my fault,’ said the capstan. ‘There’s a green brute outside that comes and hits me on the head.’
‘Tell that to the shipwrights! You’ve been in position for months and you’ve never wriggled like this before. If you aren’t careful you’ll strain us.’
‘Talking of strain,’ said a low, rasping, unpleasant voice, ‘are any of you fellows – you deck-beams, we mean – aware that those exceedingly ugly knees3 of yours happen to be riveted into our structure – ours?’
‘Who might you be?’ the deck-beams inquired.
‘Oh, nobody in particular,’ was the answer. ‘We’re only the port and starboard upper-deck stringers; and if you persist in heaving and hiking like this, we shall be reluctantly compelled to take steps.’
Now the stringers of the ship are long iron girders, so to speak, that run lengthways from stern to bow. They keep the iron frames (what are called ribs in a wooden ship) in place, and also help to hold the ends of the deck-beams, which go from side to side of the ship. Stringers always consider themselves most important, because they are so long.
‘You will take steps – will you?’ This was a long echoing rumble. It came from the frames – scores and scores of them, each one about eighteen inches distant from the next, and each riveted to the stringers in four places. ‘We think you will have a certain amount of trouble in that’; and thousands and thousands of the little rivets that held everything together whispered: ‘You will. You will! Stop quivering and be quiet. Hold on, brethren! Hold on! Hot Punches! What’s that?’
Rivets have no teeth, so they cannot chatter with fright; but they did their best as a fluttering jar swept along the ship from stern to bow, and she shook like a rat in a terrier’s mouth.
An unusually severe pitch, for the sea was rising, had lifted the big throbbing screw nearly to the surface, and it was spinning round in a kind of soda-water – half sea and half air – going much faster than was proper, because there was no true water for it to work in. As it sank again, the engines – and they were triple expansion, three cylinders in a row – snorted through all their three pistons. ‘Was that a joke, you fellow outside? It’s an uncommonly poor one. How are we to do our work if you fly off the handle that way?’ br />
‘I didn’t fly off the handle,’ said the screw, twirling huskily at the end of the screw-shaft. ‘If I had, you’d have been scrap-iron by this time. The sea dropped away from under me, and I had nothing to catch hold of. That’s all.’
‘That’s all, d’you call it?’ said the thrust-block, whose business it is to take the push of the screw; for if a screw had nothing to hold it back it would crawl right into the engine-room. (It is the holding back of the screwing action that gives the drive to a ship.) ‘I know I do my work deep down and out of sight, but I warn you I expect justice. All I ask for is bare justice. Why can’t you push steadily and evenly, instead of whizzing like a whirligig, and making me hot under all my collars.’ The thrust-block had six collars, each faced with brass, and he did not wish to get them heated.
All the bearings that supported the fifty feet of screw-shaft as it ran to the stern whispered: ‘Justice – give us justice.’
‘I can only give you what I can get,’ the screw answered. ‘Look out! It’s coming again!’