He rose with a roar as the Dimbula plunged, and ‘whack – flack – whack – whack’ went the engines furiously, for they had little to check them.
‘I’m the noblest outcome of human ingenuity – Mr Buchanan says so,’ squealed the high-pressure cylinder. ‘This is simply ridiculous!’ The piston went up savagely, and choked, for half the steam behind it was mixed with dirty water. ‘Help! Oiler! Fitter! Stoker! Help! I’m choking,’ it gasped. ‘Never in the history of maritime invention has such a calamity overtaken one so young and strong. And if I go, who’s to drive the ship?’
‘Hush! Oh, hush!’ whispered the Steam, who, of course, had been to sea many times before. He used to spend his leisure ashore in a cloud, or a gutter, or a flower-pot, or a thunderstorm, or anywhere else where water was needed. ‘That’s only a little priming, a little carrying-over, as they call it. It’ll happen all night, on and off. I don’t say it’s nice, but it’s the best we can do under the circumstances.’
‘What difference can circumstances make? I’m here to do my work – on clean, dry steam. Blow circumstances!’ the cylinder roared.
‘The circumstances will attend to the blowing. I’ve worked on the North Atlantic run a good many times – it’s going to be rough before morning.’
‘It isn’t distressingly calm now,’ said the extra-strong frames – they were called web-frames – in the engine-room. ‘There’s an upward thrust that we don’t understand, and there’s a twist that is very bad for our brackets and diamond-plates, and there’s a sort of west-north-westerly pull that follows the twist, which seriously annoys us. We mention this because we happened to cost a good deal of money, and we feel sure that the owner would not approve of our being treated in this frivolous way.’
‘I’m afraid the matter is out of the owner’s hands for the present,’ said the Steam, slipping into the condenser. ‘You’re left to your own devices till the weather betters.’
‘I wouldn’t mind the weather,’ said a flat bass voice below; ‘it’s this confounded cargo that’s breaking my heart. I’m the garboard-strake, and I’m twice as thick as most of the others, and I ought to know something.’
The garboard-strake is the lowest plate in the bottom of a ship, and the Dimbula’s garboard-strake was nearly three-quarters of an inch mild steel.
‘The sea pushes me up in a way I should never have expected,’ the strake went on, ‘and the cargo pushes me down, and, between the two, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.’
‘When in doubt, hold on,’ rumbled the Steam, making head in the boilers.
‘Yes; but there’s only dark, and cold, and hurry, down here; and how do I know whether the other plates are doing their duty? Those bulwark-plates up above, I’ve heard, ain’t more than five-sixteenths of an inch thick – scandalous, I call it.’
‘I agree with you,’ said a huge web-frame by the main cargo-hatch. He was deeper and thicker than all the others, and curved half-way across the ship in the shape of half an arch, to support the deck where deck-beams would have been in the way of cargo coming up and down. ‘I work entirely unsupported, and I observe that I am the sole strength of this vessel, so far as my vision extends. The responsibility, I assure you, is enormous. I believe the money-value of the cargo is over one hundred and fifty thousand pounds. Think of that!’
‘And every pound of it is dependent on my personal exertions.’ Here spoke a sea-valve that communicated directly with the water outside, and was seated not very far from the garboard-strake. ‘I rejoice to think that I am a Prince-Hyde Valve, with best Para rubber facings. Five patents cover me – I mention this without pride – five separate and several patents, each one finer than the other. At present I am screwed fast. Should I open, you would immediately be swamped. This is incontrovertible!’
Patent things always use the longest words they can. It is a trick that they pick up from their inventors.
‘That’s news,’ said a big centrifugal bilge-pump. ‘I had an idea that you were employed to clean decks and things with. At least, I’ve used you for that more than once. I forget the precise number, in thousands, of gallons which I am guaranteed to throw per hour; but I assure you, my complaining friends, that there is not the least danger. I alone am capable of clearing any water that may find its way here. By my Biggest Deliveries, we pitched then!’
The sea was getting up in a workmanlike style. It was a dead westerly gale, blown from under a ragged opening of green sky, narrowed on all sides by fat, grey clouds; and the wind bit like pincers as it fretted the spray into lacework on the flanks of the waves.
‘I tell you what it is,’ the foremast telephoned down its wire-stays. ‘I’m up here, and I can take a dispassionate view of things. There’s an organised conspiracy against us. I’m sure of it, because every single one of these waves is heading directly for our bows. The whole sea is concerned in it – and so’s the wind. It’s awful!’
‘What’s awful?’ said a wave, drowning the capstan for the hundredth time.
‘This organised conspiracy on your part,’ the capstan gurgled, taking his cue from the mast.
‘Organised bubbles and spindrift! There has been a depression in the Gulf of Mexico. Excuse me!’ He leaped overside; but his friends took up the tale one after another.
‘Which has advanced –’ That wave hove green water over the funnel.
‘As far as Cape Hatteras4 –’ He drenched the bridge.
‘And is now going out to sea – to sea – to sea!’ The third wave went free in three surges, making a clean sweep of a boat, which turned bottom-up and sank in the darkening troughs alongside, while the broken falls whipped the davits.5
‘That’s all there is to it,’ seethed the white water roaring through the scuppers. ‘There’s no animus in our proceedings. We’re only meteorological corollaries.’
‘Is it going to get any worse?’ said the bow-anchor chained down to the deck, where he could only breathe once in five minutes.
‘Not knowing, can’t say. Wind may blow a bit by midnight. Thanks awfully. Good-bye.’
The wave that spoke so politely had travelled some distance aft, and found itself all mixed up on the deck amidships, which was a well-deck sunk between high bulwarks. One of the bulwark-plates, which was hung on hinges to open outward, had swung out, and passed the bulk of the water back to the sea again with a clean smack.
‘Evidently that’s what I’m made for,’ said the plate, closing again with a sputter of pride. ‘Oh no, you don’t, my friend!’
The top of a wave was trying to get in from the outside, but as the plate did not open in that direction, the defeated water spurted back.
‘Not bad for five-sixteenths of an inch,’ said the bulwark-plate. ‘My work, I see, is laid down for the night’; and it began opening and shutting with the motion of the ship as it was designed to do.
‘We are not what you might call idle,’ groaned all the frames together, as the Dimbula climbed a big wave, lay on her side at the top, and shot into the next hollow, twisting in the descent. A huge swell pushed up exactly under her middle, and her bow and stern hung free with nothing to support them. Then one joking wave caught her up at the bow, and another at the stern, while the rest of the water slunk away from under her just to see how she would like it; so she was held up at her two ends only, and the weight of the cargo and the machinery fell on the groaning iron keels and bilge-stringers.
‘Ease off! Ease off, there!’ roared the garboard-strake. ‘I want one-eighth of an inch fair play. D’you hear me, you rivets!’
‘Ease off! Ease off!’ cried the bilge-stringers. ‘Don’t hold us so tight to the frames!’
‘Ease off!’ grunted the deck-beams, as the Dimbula rolled fearfully. ‘You’ve cramped our knees into the stringers, and we can’t move. Ease off, you flat-headed little nuisances.’
Then two converging seas hit the bows, one on each side, and fell away in torrents of streaming thunder.
‘Ease off!’ shouted th
e forward collision-bulkhead. ‘I want to crumple up, but I’m stiffened in every direction. Ease off, you dirty little forge-filings. Let me breathe!’
All the hundreds of plates that are riveted to the frames, and make the outside skin of every steamer, echoed the call, for each plate wanted to shift and creep a little, and each plate, according to its position, complained against the rivets.
‘We can’t help it! We can’t help it!’ they murmured in reply. ‘We’re put here to hold you, and we’re going to do it. You never pull us twice in the same direction. If you’d say what you were going to do next, we’d try to meet your views.’
‘As far as I could feel,’ said the upper-deck planking, and that was four inches thick, ‘every single iron near me was pushing or pulling in opposite directions. Now, what’s the sense of that? My friends, let us all pull together.’
‘Pull any way you please,’ roared the funnel, ‘so long as you don’t try your experiments on me. I need seven wire ropes, all pulling in different directions, to hold me steady. Isn’t that so?’
‘We believe you, my boy!’ whistled the funnel-stays through their clenched teeth, as they twanged in the wind from the top of the funnel to the deck.
‘Nonsense! We must all pull together,’ the decks repeated. ‘Pull lengthways.’
‘Very good,’ said the stringers; ‘then stop pushing sideways when you get wet. Be content to run gracefully fore and aft, and curve in at the ends as we do.’
‘No! – No curves at the ends! A very slight workmanlike curve from side to side, with a good grip at each knee, and little pieces welded on,’ said the deck-beams.
‘Fiddle!’ cried the iron pillars of the deep, dark hold. ‘Who ever heard of curves? Stand up straight; be a perfectly round column, and carry tons of good solid weight – like that! There!’ A big sea smashed on the deck above, and the pillars stiffened themselves to the load.
‘Straight up and down is not bad,’ said the frames, who ran that way in the sides of the ship, ‘but you must also expand yourselves sideways. Expansion is the law of life, children. Open out! open out!’
‘Come back!’ said the deck-beams savagely, as the upward heave of the sea made the frames try to open. ‘Come back to your bearings, you slack-jawed irons!’
‘Rigidity! Rigidity! Rigidity!’ thumped the engines. ‘Absolute, unvarying rigidity – rigidity!’
‘You see!’ whined the rivets in chorus. ‘No two of you will ever pull alike, and – and you blame it all on us. We only know how to go through a plate and bite down on both sides so that it can’t, and mustn’t, and shan’t move.’
‘I’ve got one fraction of an inch play, at any rate,’ said the garboard-strake, triumphantly. So he had, and all the bottom of the ship felt the easier for it.
‘Then we’re no good,’ sobbed the bottom rivets. ‘We were ordered – we were ordered – never to give; and we’ve given, and the sea will come in, and we’ll all go to the bottom together! First we’re blamed for everything unpleasant, and now we haven’t the consolation of having done our work.’
‘Don’t say I told you,’ whispered the Steam consolingly; ‘but, between you and me and the last cloud I came from, it was bound to happen sooner or later. You had to give a fraction, and you’ve given without knowing it. Now, hold on, as before.’
‘What’s the use?’ a few hundred rivets chattered. ‘We’ve given – we’ve given; and the sooner we confess that we can’t keep the ship together, and go off our little heads, the easier it will be. No rivet forged can stand this strain.’
‘No one rivet was ever meant to. Share it among you,’ the Steam answered.
‘The others can have my share. I’m going to pull out,’ said a rivet in one of the forward plates.
‘If you go, others will follow,’ hissed the Steam. ‘There’s nothing so contagious in a boat as rivets going. Why, I knew a little chap like you – he was an eighth of an inch fatter, though – on a steamer – to be sure, she was only nine hundred tons, now I come to think of it – in exactly the same place as you are. He pulled out in a bit of a bobble of a sea, not half as bad as this, and he started all his friends on the same butt-strap, and the plates opened like a furnace door, and I had to climb into the nearest fog-bank, while the boat went down.’
‘Now that’s peculiarly disgraceful,’ said the rivet. ‘Fatter than me, was he, and in a steamer half our tonnage? Reedy little peg! I blush for the family, sir.’ He settled himself more firmly than ever in his place, and the Steam chuckled.
‘You see,’ he went on, quite gravely, ‘a rivet, and especially a rivet in your position, is really the one indispensable part of the ship.’
The Steam did not say that he had whispered the very same thing to every single piece of iron aboard. There is no sense in telling too much truth.
And all that while the little Dimbula pitched and chopped, and swung and slewed, and lay down as though she were going to die, and got up as though she had been stung, and threw her nose round and round in circles half-a-dozen times as she dipped; for the gale was at its worst. It was inky black, in spite of the tearing white froth on the waves, and, to top everything, the rain began to fall in sheets, so that you could not see your hand before your face. This did not make much difference to the ironwork below, but it troubled the foremast a good deal.
‘Now it’s all finished,’ he said dismally. ‘The conspiracy is too strong for us. There is nothing left but to –’
‘Hurraar! Brrrraaah! Brrrrrrp!’ roared the Steam through the fog-horn, till the decks quivered. ‘Don’t be frightened, below. It’s only me, just throwing out a few words, in case any one happens to be rolling round to-night.’
‘You don’t mean to say there’s anyone except us on the sea in such weather?’ said the funnel in a husky snuffle.
‘Scores of ’em,’ said the Steam, clearing its throat. ‘Rrrrrraaa! Brraaaaa! Prrrrp! It’s a trifle windy up here; and, Great Boilers! how it rains!’
‘We’re drowning,’ said the scuppers. They had been doing nothing else all night, but this steady thrash of rain above them seemed to be the end of the world.
‘That’s all right. We’ll be easier in an hour or two. First the wind and then the rain: Soon you may make sail again! Grrraaaaaah! Drrrraaaa! Drrrp! I have a notion that the sea is going down already. If it does you’ll learn something about rolling. We’ve only pitched till now. By the way, aren’t you chaps in the hold a little easier than you were?’
There was just as much groaning and straining as ever, but it was not so loud or squeaky in tone; and when the ship quivered she did not jar stiffly, like a poker hit on the floor, but gave with a supple little waggle, like a perfectly balanced golf-club.
‘We have made a most amazing discovery,’ said the stringers, one after another. ‘A discovery that entirely changes the situation. We have found, for the first time in the history of shipbuilding, that the inward pull of the deck-beams and the outward thrust of the frames lock us, as it were, more closely in our places, and enable us to endure a strain which is entirely without parallel in the records of marine architecture.’
The Steam turned a laugh quickly into a roar up the fog-horn. ‘What massive intellects you great stringers have!’ he said softly, when he had finished.
‘We also,’ began the deck-beams, ‘are discoverers and geniuses. We are of opinion that the support of the hold-pillars materially helps us. We find that we lock up on them when we are subjected to a heavy and singular weight of sea above.’
Here the Dimbula shot down a hollow, lying almost on her side, – righting at the bottom with a wrench and a spasm.
‘In these cases – are you aware of this, Steam? – the plating at the bows, and particularly at the stern – we would also mention the floors beneath us – help us to resist any tendency to spring.’ The frames spoke in the solemn, awed voice which people use when they have just come across something entirely new for the very first time.
‘I’m only a poor
puffy little flutterer,’ said the Steam, ‘but I have to stand a good deal of pressure in my business. It’s all tremendously interesting. Tell us some more. You fellows are so strong.’
‘Watch us and you’ll see,’ said the bow-plates proudly. ‘Ready, behind there! Here’s the Father and Mother of Waves coming! Sit tight, rivets all!’ A great sluicing comber thundered by, but through the scuffle and confusion the Steam could hear the low, quick cries of the ironwork as the various strains took them – cries like these: ‘Easy, now – easy! Now push for all your strength! Hold out! Give a fraction! Hold up! Pull in! Shove crossways! Mind the strain at the ends! Grip, now! Bite tight! Let the water get away from under – and there she goes!’
The wave raced off into the darkness, shouting, ‘Not bad, that, if it’s your first run!’ and the drenched and ducked ship throbbed to the beat of the engines inside her. All three cylinders were white with the salt spray that had come down through the engine-room hatch; there was white fur on the canvas-bound steam-pipes, and even the bright-work deep below was speckled and soiled; but the cylinders had learned to make the most of steam that was half water, and were pounding along cheerfully.
‘How’s the noblest outcome of human ingenuity hitting it?’ said the Steam, as he whirled through the engine-room.
‘Nothing for nothing in this world of woe,’ the cylinders answered, as though they had been working for centuries, ‘and precious little for seventy-five pounds’ head. We’ve made two knots this last hour and a quarter! Rather humiliating for eight hundred horse-power, isn’t it?’
‘Well, it’s better than drifting astern, at any rate. You seem rather less – how shall I put it? – stiff in the back than you were.’
‘If you’d been hammered as we’ve been this night, you wouldn’t be stiff–iff–iff, either. Theoreti–retti–retti–cally, of course, rigidity is the thing. Purrr – purr – practically, there has to be a little give and take. We found that out by working on our sides for five minutes at a stretch – chch – chh. How’s the weather?’