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Title: The S.S. Glory
Author: Frederick Niven
Illustrator: Fred Holmes
Release Date: April 24, 2019 [EBook #59343]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE S.S. GLORY ***
Produced by Al Haines
[Illustration: Cover art]
[Frontispiece: The Glory glided into the Newfoundland fog.]
THE S.S. GLORY
BY
FREDERICK NIVEN
AUTHOR OF "JUSTICE OF THE PEACE"
"HANDS UP!" ETC.
ILLUSTRATED BY FRED HOLMES
LONDON
WILLIAM HEINEMANN
London: William Heinemann, 1915
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
The "Glory" ... glided into the Newfoundland fog . . . Frontispiece
The new comer approached more closely and looked at the crowd
There! They were apart
Asked of the evil-smelling darkness below many insulting questions
Flailed his way along the line
It seemed to be rushing at them with all its great dark purple hollows,
its purple hillsides, its snowy crests
Again the other cattleship forged level
The Manager says this is an American coin
CHAPTER I
Somebody was playing a mouth-organ in the midst of a group of "hard
cases" that waited on a certain wharf at Montreal. You who arrive
there in spick and span passenger steamers can pick out the place from
the promenade decks as you come alongside, for on the shed roofs is
painted, with waterproof paint, "The Saint Lawrence Shipping and
Transport Co., Ltd."
At the gable of these sheds the Hard Cases waited, alert for anybody of
importance coming from citywards. But they did not forget that the
important person might be already in the sheds. Therefore, as they
strolled a step or two forth and back, or double-shuffled in response
to the mouth organ, they cast glances now and then into the shed,
between the lattice-work of a barrier at its end, a barrier that
continued the slope of the roof to the wharf-side and about a foot
beyond. A determined man could have clambered round it at the
projecting part, or over it for that matter--although it looked fragile
at the top as well as showing many prominent nails. But no one did
clamber over it, or round it even. In America there is a sneaking
regard for the man who climbs over, or crawls round, barricades; but it
was hardly likely that any of the Hard Cases, who waited for a job
outside the barrier, would have obtained that job at the end of such
gymnastics. These men were not hoboes, tramps, sundowners,
beachcombers, though there was not a handkerchief-full of luggage in
the crowd. They were cattlemen, who lead a life more hard and
uncertain than that of sparrows, crossing and recrossing the great,
grey Atlantic, with Liverpool for their British port; and, for their
American ports, Montreal, Halifax, Boston.
"Well, what's this?" said one of them, Big Mike.
The "Push" glanced at "this"--a lean man, brown as an Indian, wearing a
broad-brimmed hat that set him apart from the "Push," which wore,
chiefly, scooped sailor-caps, and, secondly, dilapidated Trilbys.
True, the latter were of felt, but only in regard to material were they
like this hat that hove in sight on the newcomer's head.
[Illustration: The new comer approached more closely and looked at the
crowd.]
"What's he?" asked Jack, a slender and finely-built young man with a
face handsome and devil-may-care and cunning, a face oddly aristocratic
though leathery, and bearing signs that ablution was not a daily matter
in his life any more than in the lives of the others.
"It's one of them cow-boys," said Mike. "One of them fellers that
comes from beyant, in the cars with the cattle, and takes a thrip over
sometimes to see what its loike in our counthry."
"I suppose 'e'll go fer nuthin'," said Cockney. "Do one of hus out of
a job."
"Well, ye needn't be supposing till ye hear," answered Mike. "I never
seen wan of them do that yet."
The newcomer approached more closely and looked at the crowd, one of
whose members, an inquisitive youth, caught his eye and daringly
proffered assistance.
"You goin' on this ship?" he asked.
"I hope so. I've just come down to see how the chances are."
The "Push" that had been listening mostly in quarter and three-quarter
face, wheeled about, and all their "dials," as they would have
expressed it, confronted him.
"'Ow much you goin' to hask?" said Cockney.
"What do they usually give?"
"Oh, I don't know," several replied.
Jack extracted himself from the "Push" to spit over the wharf-side, and
then turned back again.
"Thirty shillings," he said.
"Is that what you get?" asked the Inquisitive One.
Canted back, hands in pockets, Jack leered at him.
"You hask thirty shillings then," said Cockney.
Big Mike pushed through.
"What are ye all talking about?" he said. "I tell ye what it is, now,"
he went on, turning to the stranger. "There's some of these fellers go
over for tin shillin's; the most of them don't get more'n a pound, and
when it's getting cold here you'll find 'em runnin' round and saying,
'I'll go for fifteen shillin's, mister.' But if ye came down from
beyant in the cars yourself ye're all right. You fellers that come
down from The Great Plains goes on with your own cattle on the ships if
ye want."
Some of the lesser lights in the "Push" snarled.
"Want more than ten shillings," said the subject of their discussion.
"Ten shillings for across the Atlantic! Good Lord!"
"There now! What was I tellin' ye?" asked Mike of Cockney.
"What does he want comin' round?" said a man with eyes in which madness
showed.
"Did ye come down on the cars?" asked Mike again.
"No--I didn't come down with cattle. I can't tell them that so as to
get on."
"There you are then!" cried he of the mad eyes, and walked away.
Mike looked frowningly at the young man.
"Well, young feller," he said, "you've no cause for worry. It doesn't
matter whether ye came down in the cattle cars or not. That hat of
yours will get ye the first chance."
Some of them laughed, and he turned and looked scathingly at them, but
did not deign to explain that he was serious. Cockney, who had
understood the significance of Mike's words, if he did not now come
over exactly as ally to the newcomer, at least withdrew from his
position as a possible enemy.
"That's right!" he declared. "That's the kind of 'at the fellers wear
up there w'ere the cattle comes from. You hask thirty shillings. You
know about cattle any'ow wiv that 'at. They'll bring yer down to a
quid. Well, that's all right, ain't it? Good luck."
The others seemed to see the justice of this. Mike hitched his belt
and regained his position as Bull of that herd by saying: "Pay no
attintion to thim----"
"To _me_?" yelled Cockney, breaking in.
"That's all right, that's all right," said Mike soothingly to him.
"You're all right. See, young feller,"--to the man with the Stetson
hat--"you come over here beside me and I'll tell you when there's a
chance."
The young fellow came toward him.
"Good luck!" said Cockney.
"What _I_ get," added Mike, "is none of their business."
"Well," said the young fellow, "ten bob to 'tend cattle across the
Atlantic seems pretty poor. I'll ask thirty."
"Well, ye can't do better than that, can ye?" answered Mike. "Askin'
it, I mane."
Cockney whirled round upon someone who had muttered, and thrust forward
his face at the end of an elastic neck.
"No, he's not--'e's not goin' over fer nuthin'! Didn't yer 'ear 'im
say? I bet yer 'e'll go over fer more'n you."
A short broad man, somewhat like Mike in miniature, declaimed: "What's
the use o' listening? Can't believe anybody. I hear a feller say: 'I
wouldn't go over for ten shillings--wouldn't go over for less than two
quid.' Believe he goes over just to get across--for nothing."
Several, at this, glanced grinning at the young man whom Mike had
befriended.
"No," said the miniature edition of Mike, "I don't mean him. _He's_
not a liar anyhow. I can tell that. I mean fellers that talks and
talks about what they would do and what they wouldn't do."
"Pay no attintion to thim fellers," said Mike, less talking to the
newcomer in particular than generally, to those in the group who had
ears to hear. And then to his new friend: "You didn't come down in the
cars then, young feller?"
"I've come from the West," answered the young fellow.
"That's good enough," said Mike, in the accents of one instilling hope.
"There's no need to answer what they don't ask. You look as if you
came from beyant. Let yer hat spake for ye. Here he comes now."
Hands behind back, walking slow, came a man of forty or so, lean,
grizzled, projecting himself with easy swinging steps toward the
"Push," looking at them, head bent, from under his brows, with eyes so
calculating and keen that the glance might have been considered
malevolent were it not for a faint smile, or suggestion of a smile,
about his close-pressed lips. There was a fresh agitation among the
"Push," as of a pool when a stone is dropped therein. Mike stood a
little more erect and drew his chin back. The aristocratic-looking
Jack--in some queer way, despite his old, seedy, hand-me-down garments,
he was almost dandyish--hands in pockets, jacket wrinkled up behind,
body canted backwards, strolled out of the group a step or two with
eyes on the man who advanced upon them, and strolled back again, as one
who would draw attention to himself.
"Is this one of the bosses?" inquired the young man who had come by
kind request if not exactly under Mike's wing at least to his side.
Mike gave a brief nod and closed one eye.
"Candlass," he said; and Candlass coming now level with them, Mike
leant towards him and made a grimace which evidently Candlass
understood. The others, at this, tried to crowd in between them.
Candlass frowned grimly, opened a door in that latticed barricade
between shed and wharf-side, and passed through. The "Push"--one might
now have a hint of the derivation of its name--flocked after him, but
he stood in the narrow entrance way and considered it over his shoulder
as a man looks at a bunch of doubtful dogs that snap at his heels.
Mike commented, in the background: "What are yez all crowding for?
He'll tell ye when he wants us." Candlass closed the gate in the
barricade, moved slowly away, but was still to be seen by those
outside. He walked along the wharf looking up at the iron wall of the
_S.S. Glory_ that lay there, considered the high-sided cattle gangways
that stretched up to the hull. Then he turned away and disappeared in
the rear of the nearest shed, to reappear anon with a stout, fatherly
man whose clothes had the appearance of rather being made to measure
than reached off a hook. This man seemed to be trying to look grim,
but when Candlass swung over to the barricade, whipped open the door,
and wheeled back again as a sign to the "Push" to enter--and they did
enter--any mere looker-on could have seen a quick droop of his eyelids,
a momentary biting of his lip as of a man who is hurt in some way.
There was a deal of the milk of human kindness about Mr. Smithers,
wharf-manager of the St. Lawrence Shipping and Transport Co., and he
never became used to the Hard Cases. He often wanted to know all about
them, where they were born, how they lived, what they thought of it
all. Some of the men, out of their breast-pockets, were tentatively
withdrawing bundles of discharge papers lest John Candlass might care
to see them. Candlass looked over the crowd again as it thronged into
the St. Lawrence shed. He spoke now, for the first time, and his voice
was amazingly quiet.
"I don't want _you_," he said to one man, with a quick lift of his
eyebrows; and the man went out backwards, and swiftly, suggesting in
his manner that he was ready either to put up a fight if pursued, or to
turn tail and run the moment he passed through the barrier again. He
backed away from the sultry and quiet Candlass much as a lion-tamer
leaves a cage. Another man prepared to follow him, yet not as if
whole-hearted in his retreat. Candlass had an eye on him.
"Er----" he began, in the tone of one who considers to himself. The
retreating man heard this and paused like a weather-cock in a lull,
looked at Candlass, and Candlass looked at him. They studied each
other thus in a way that made the others, brief though the time of
study might be, realise that there had been some prior understanding or
misunderstanding, between the two.
"Well," said Candlass, still in that low voice, "if you think you can
behave yourself."
The man's expression changed. A waggish look came on his face.
"All right, Mr. Candlass."
"All right then," said Candlass. "You can wait around and I'll see--if
I don't get plenty otherwise. Leave it that way."
Candlass looked over the group once more, then nodded to Mr. Smithers.
"All right. Come this way, boys," said Mr. Smithers. But though he
straightened his back and thrust his neck into his collar in the
recognised attitude of people who are not to be trifled with, there was
something paternal that he could not efface from himself as he walked
over to a little office on wheels that stood in a backward corner of
the shed. In the wall of this box contrivance a small window opened on
his arrival, and a clerk was beheld within.
Candlass said: "Line up, boys; one at a time."
Mike elbowed himself to leading position, looking round at his new
friend. "You come with me, lad." And when some grumbled, "Well,
well," he said. "We all have a chance."
The man to whom Candlass had decided to give another trial strolled
backward and stood beyond the group so as to be last in the string.
"Now then, come along," said Smithers, and tapped twice with the end of
a fountain pen on the little ledge before the diminutive window. The
"Push," realising that all would have a chance, seeing how few there
were, did not crowd now. There was more of: "You go ahead"--"No,
that's all right, you go!"--than of anxiety. One by one they stepped
up to the wicket, to one side of which Smithers leant, and in front of
which Candlass had taken his stand. Each in turn exchanged a few quiet
words with these two; the clerk within, pen in hand, bent over his
tome, giving ear at the window. Once or twice Candlass looked round
and beckoned to a man, when the group, milling instead of retaining the
queue, was slow to decide who should go next. He did this by raising a
hand, thumb and forefinger in air, looking keen and cold in some man's
eye, and then flicking down the forefinger and dropping his hand to his
side again. While this signing on was still in progress there entered
the shed, slowly swinging his legs forward, clad in dirty khaki,
large-hatted like the young man of whom we have already heard, a
close-lipped, short-nosed youth. Candlass remarked him as he came in
and said: "All right, you. Come ahead."
"One of the fellows what come down in the cars," it was suggested, or
explained.
A little later there came a man in a long coat, tweed cap, heavy boots,
leggings, wearing spectacles.
"What's this blown in?" one asked.
Smithers, by the side of the wicket, drew a deep breath.
"All right. Come ahead," called Candlass.
"Did _that_ come down in the cars?" inquired a little pale-faced,
thin-handed youngster.
Mike, standing over to one side with those who had already signed on,
offered explanation:
"He's one of them young fellers from up behind somewheres. Comes from
feedin' pigs, and doin' the chores, and what they call learnin'
farmin'." He noticed that his newly adopted friend had allowed some
others to precede him and had not yet signed on. "Go on there forward,
young feller," he admonished. "Take your turn there after Four Eyes
with the coat."
"Go on, then, go on," chorussed several of the "Push," and he who,
though he wore the Hat of the Great Plains, had not come down on the
cars with cattle, as indeed had that other large-hatted recent arrival,
stepped up to the wicket. The onlookers noticed that with him, as with
others, there was evidently a little bargaining being done.
"No--'e's not goin' fer nuthin'; 'e's all right," said Cockney to Mike.
Mike merely turned his head toward Cockney and then turned it away
again.
CHAPTER II
When the young man to whom Mike had extended kindness passed from the
wicket, having agreed to tend cattle across the Atlantic for the sum of
fifteen shillings, he found that he had already been christened.
Perhaps his lack of diffidence in signing his name in the book which
was turned round to him by the clerk, after the quiet discussion of
terms was over, had suggested the new name to Mike.
"That's right, Scholar," he said.
"How much are you going to get?" asked the Inquisitive One, jumping
forward, left shoulder advanced, and thrusting his face close to
Scholar.
"He's after getting as much as you!" said Mike. "Don't you be telling
him, Scholar, or he'll be running back to the wicket and saying: 'I
want as much as the other feller there.'"
The Inquisitive One contented himself by looking at Mike's boots,
trousers and belt, torn waistcoat, shirt, and black-and-white scarf,
briefly at his face, and then, turning about, executed a heel and toe
movement of right foot and left foot alternately, looking at the others
and inclining his head towards Mike, in a kind of silent, noncommittal:
"You observe?" Mike, too, observed, as his slight drawing erect
signified, the slight toss of his chin, a dismissing toss, somewhat
leonine. Then his eye rested on the youth in the long coat, and
disapproval was in his eye. He had no objection to cattlemen in big
hats from "beyant," who had come down in the cars with cattle,
continuing across the Atlantic. He had no objection to other young men
in big hats, who had not come down with cattle, but who wanted to cross
the Atlantic. But that heavy, stolid, long-coated, legginged,
spectacled lout seemed to him an indignity thrust upon them. He
studied him a long while, with his weight now upon left foot, right
advanced, toe tapping the cobbles, anon shifting weight to his right
foot, leaning back, left foot advanced and left shoulder almost in a
fighting attitude. The man in the long coat did not seem to be one of
them. He might be going over this way simply to save money, not
because he was hard up. It was different with the short-nosed man in
the old soiled khaki; he did not seem to be by any means on his uppers,
but he looked as one to whom all this was part of the day's work. His
arrival had shown more clearly that Scholar might not be typical of men
from "beyant," or "the Great Plains where the cattle comes from,"
despite his hat, but Scholar still remained not anathema; he was brown
with the sun and the open air, and he had that touch of vagabondage
that made him welcome although an outsider. He had come into their
midst with an air of "If you don't mind, boys," but that long-coated,
and leggined, and spectacled one didn't come in at all; he was just
there. Mike had to ask the opinions of the others at this stage.
"What do you think of that?" he said quietly. "Is that a Jonah? Don't
like the look of it. Looks a Jonah."
Long Jack's partner, whose name was Johnnie, and who had a way of
varying the double-shuffling to the mouth-organ by striking belligerent
attitudes at the others and making feints at them with a fist, paused
in his mixture of double-shuffle and pugilistic rehearsal, to look at
the subject of Mike's doubt.
"_That!_" he said. He peered at him, walked a little way toward him
where he stood aloof, whirled on his heel, and coming back to the
group, raised a fist as if to smite and announced: "He's one of them
fellers that goes up on the Ontario farms, up in the bush--half silly,
farmers get them for their board; learn to milk cows, shovel horse
dung, and all that."
"Yus," said Cockney. "That's wot 'e is."
Mike's expression was like that of a man disgusted. Had he not already
told them this? Candlass put an end, for the time being, to farther
speculation.
"Get on to the main deck, you fellows," he ordered, "and you'll see
some bales of hay there. Cut them open and bed down."
The "Push" began to swarm up one of the gangways, the one nearer to
them, that led to the lower deck. Mike looked at it; its condition
showed that lower deck cattle were already on board.
"Indade," he said, "there's no sense in dirtying your shoes before ye
nade to," and he led the way to the second gangway, which was canted up
to the main deck, and was clean. The ascent was not much steeper, for
the gangway was longer and led off from farther back on the wharf.
"Oh, all right," said Candlass, as he saw his men going up in two
portions. "It's all the same." But he called after those who were
going up to the lower deck: "Don't you fellows hang about down there
when you get aboard."
They nodded, and some responded with an "Aye, aye, sir," and up they
ran, talking and laughing among themselves in jeering fashion.
Candlass stood on the dock and waited till they were on board, so that
those that turned their heads, when they stepped on deck, to look down,
met his eye. The "Push" gathered on the main deck. Those who had gone
direct to it, looking down the hatches, could see, what those who had
come up the other way already knew, that the lower deck cattle were
already all on board. The full complement was already there; and
beyond the docks were now the cling-clang of an advancing bell, a
locomotive bell, and more lowing of cattle. Amidships many bales of
hay had been tumbled.
"Now we want an axe," said Mike.
"There's a queer fellow below with an axe," volunteered one of those
who had come up by the lower deck. "Here he comes."
He came. He came as if to slaughter them all, a man of maybe fifty,
shirt open, one brace sustaining his trousers, bald-headed, almost
toothless, scarred upon the forehead. He was neither fat nor lean,
showing at once many protuberant bones, cheek and chin and breast
bones, and rolls of fat under chin, and on abdomen, to which his shirt
clung, damp from excessive labour in the stuffy ship. He charged upon
the bales of hay, smote furiously at the wires that bound them,
heedless of the possible scratches when they sprung apart, and yelling,
"Here you are! Roll it away--roll that away now," rolled the bale over
himself so that it fell apart as in compressed cakes or slices. "Well,
if you won't roll, carry away, carry away," he went on, hitting the
next bale; and, dodging his axe, the "Push" gathered armfuls and
hastened off to shake and to tease out these armfuls into the strong
pens ranged all round the ship's sides and down the ship's centre,
ranged so closely that if two men passed abreast they had need to be
slender men. Hardly had they finished coming and going on this
employment than the ki-yi-ing of men's voices, and the lowing of beasts
caused the bedders-down to pause and give ear. The man who had broken
open the bales suddenly appeared again, screaming oaths. "Come along
here, and tie up!"
Blundering up the deck, up the gangway, came steer after steer. When
they found themselves aboard, with bars such as the corral bars that
they knew of old before them, they wheeled sharply and away they went
running, lowing, away forward, then across the ship and down the other
side. The man with the axe rushed across, and every here and there
thrust a plank from front barrier to ship's side, turning the long
corral that ran round the ship into many smaller pens. Then came a
cessation in the river of steers that ran aboard.
"Come over here and I'll show you, Scholar," said Mike. What Mike had
to show to the tenderfoot cattleman was how to take the ropes that hung
all along the pen fronts, throw them over the steers' necks, pull the
slack end through a hole in the flat front board, knot it, and then let
it go. The hole in each case was only large enough to admit of the
rope, consequently the knot upon the end was all that was necessary for
making fast. It was a duty not without some excitement, for the
steers, arranged now in pens, thanks to the boards that the Mad Boss
had thrust across (five, six, or seven to a pen), would persist in
milling. Round and round they moved, and before each pen a man, or two
men, worked. After a few minutes the steers in the pen before which
Mike and Scholar laboured had each a rope tied round its neck. That
was the first duty done, not without scrimmage. And now they went on
to the second part of that work, the making fast. As steer by steer
was hauled up to the board, and the rope pulled through, there was
trouble.
"Watch your hands!" shouted Mike, hanging on to a halter while Scholar
tried to affix the knot. His shout was barely in time. The steer
flung backward, and smack went Scholar's hand against the board, for he
still clung tenaciously to the rope's end. "All right!" he replied,
for he had succeeded in making the knot just in time, and when the
steer strained back the knot also smacked on the board. A tug of war
began upon the next one. Farther away a sudden shout arose, and they
looked along the deck. The Mad Boss, who had been armed with an axe a
short time previously, was now blaspheming against the ship's side. He
had jumped into one of the pens, armed with a stick, in an endeavour to
make the animals face the front board, and one of them now had propped
itself against him. There was an unholy glee on the faces of some of
the men, those who looked upon the squeeze that he was getting as good
punishment for his method of treating them.
"You, you----" he half gurgled, half shouted a series of scathing names
at them. He caught Scholar's eye. "Can't you lend a hand here?"
Scholar could lend a hand. He grabbed up a piece of stick and vaulted
into the pen. After all, he had signed on as a cattleman, and a long
horn must not intimidate him. He hoped that even if he had not signed
on his pause before leaping to the rescue would have been of no longer
duration. The very close proximity of the steers among which he leapt
was his salvation. There was not room for them to run upon him, heads
down. He gave two twists to the tail of the steer that had pinned the
mad foreman; it relaxed and swung round facing the tying board, where
Mike adroitly grabbed the rope, hauled the loose end through, and
knotted it--just in time. Back went the animal's head, and smack came
the knot against the board.
"Now, you," said the mad-looking boss to Scholar. "Take care of
yourself. I'm all right now--aisy there. Slip over."
Scholar watched for his chance; but he did not slip over. The chance
came to slip under, and he did so, coming on to the alley-way with a
kind of side dive, while the man to whose rescue he had gone, seizing a
favourable opportunity, dodged into the neighbouring pen and from
thence gained the alley-way.
"That's being a man!" he said, nodding to Scholar. "Rafferty won't
forget ye."
"Who is he?" asked Scholar of Mike.
"Him? Oh, he's bossing the Lower Deck, but he's come up here till
Candlass comes aboard, I suppose."
Perhaps two hours later this instalment of steers was all tied up, and
the remaining space of deck, awaiting the next batch, was almost all
strewn with hay. Many of the men seemed bored. There was a constant
hinting that an adjournment for liquor should be made. Candlass had
not yet appeared; Rafferty had disappeared; the "Push" was alone, and
Mike seemed to be half in command.
"I tell yez," he said, "there's nobody going ashore till the
bedding-down's finished."
"Candlass didn't tell you to----" began he who has been spoken of as a
kind of diminutive Mike.
"Never mind what Candlass told me. I'm telling you that if Candlass
comes aboard and finds that we haven't finished bedding-down entoirely
it's me he'll jump on."
"Well, good luck, here's beddin'-dahn," said Cockney.
Mike drew erect, stretched, blew a great breath, and wiped his forehead
with the back of his hand.
"I could be doing with a drop meself," he said, "but duty's duty."
There was a halt in the arrival of the hay.
"Where's them lads bringing the hay?" he asked.
"Perhaps there ain't no more bales," said Cockney.
It might have been the Devil that prompted Scholar at that moment.
Perhaps he was feeling a little gay after his bout with the steers;
perhaps he thought how funny it would be if Mike led the way ashore for
refreshment after having so recently proclaimed that no man would go
ashore for that purpose until the bedding-down was over. Perhaps he
thought to make some sign to these men that he appreciated the fact
that they had not all cold-shouldered him as an outsider, and could
think of only one way to do it that would seem expressive to them.
"Well," he said, "let me stand the treat anyhow."
Mike turned upon him.
"Do you mane it?" he asked.
Scholar nodded.
"Come along, boys," cried Mike.
It now appeared that many of them had already vacated the deck. Jack
and Jack's partner and several others were gone. The cowboy was
nowhere to be seen; the man of the long coat and spectacles was all
alone, making some knots more sure upon the ropes, tying fresh ones on
those that had been knotted so near the end as to suggest to a watchful
eye that a few vigorous pulls of a steer's head would make them give.
"We'll lave him," said Mike, and those few who remained hurried to
depart, clustering round Mike and Scholar. A bo'sun at the gangway
said: "There's some more cattle coming up, you fellows."
"Let them come," replied Mike. "Everything's ready for them."
One of the "Push" told the bo'sun that there was a parson along there,
with spectacles on, who would tie them up, and down the gangway went
the crowd. Scholar perhaps need not have been so greatly vexed
afterwards for having carried these men away. As they went down the
gangway they woke to the fact that they were the only cattlemen left.
The others, who had come aboard with them under Candlass's eye, had
been more alert to note when the Mad Boss turned his back, and had
already hastened off to amuse themselves before sailing. Great
sizzling lights were by now lit above the wharf. Back in the shadows
of the shed could be seen many tossing horns. Neither Candlass nor the
Mad Boss interrupted them. Smithers was not about; perhaps he had gone
home to supper. Outside the lath partition was a little new mob of
dead-beats, and some of those going out recognized friends there and
hailed them. There was a smell of docks, and of cattle, and of grain;
there was much noise of iron gangways being run to and fro, cling-clang
of locomotive bells, hiss of the new-lit lights. Things were all in
just uncertain enough light for a man here and there to stub a toe on a
stretched hawser. Overhead an exquisite pale blue, and fading pink,
showed the aftermath of the day, high, far-off, serene.
CHAPTER III
Lamplight and daylight blent in the waterfront streets, and as the
little crowd of men left the more open wharf front, where there was
also some reflected last daylight from the docks and the river, a
looker-on might have been touched deeply, seeing the quick-going day,
the gathering shadows in the gulches of the streets, the lighting up of
the saloons, and that knot of men, more homeless than sparrows,
drifting across the twilight. And they were not of the bottom rung, at
least not in their own estimation. A man in the uniform of the
Salvation Army passed by, and that member of the "Push" who looked like
a squat Mike, and whose name, it transpired, was Michael, turned to
Scholar and commented: "I suppose the Salvation Army does some good in
its own way--among the lowest classes." And again a few paces on, when
one of the men in the rear broke out: "Here, where are you fellows
going? What's the matter with this?" Michael looked over his shoulder
and shook his head in dissent; and a little further still, as the man
behind was still wanting to know what was the matter with the saloon in
question: "We don't want to go in there," Michael said. "There ain't
enough of us. That's a bad, low-down joint."
"Scared, are you?" jeered the other.
"There's a bad push goes in there," said Michael, "and you don't stand
a show if you're not in the swing."
"Go on! What could they do?"
It would appear that Michael felt his powers of explaining inadequate.
"Mike," he said, "here's a fellow wants to know what they would do with
him back there."
"What they would do to him, is it?" asked Mike. "It all depinds
whether he feels in his pockuts and fetches out the nate money as if it
was his last nickel."
The man behind seemed interested.
"Supposing I put down fifty cents?" he said.
Mike looked at him witheringly.
"You'd have to spind the change on thim," he said.
"Oh!"
"But if ye want to see the whole thing for yoursilf, my device to you,
me lad, is to plant down a dollar--if ye have it. If ye hadn't plenty
of fighting friends with ye, ye might just as well hand it to them. If
it's a rough house ye're wantin', we might all go in and oblige ye, but
spakin' for mesilf, I'm wantin' a quiet drink."
"That's right," Michael commented quietly, with a nod to Scholar, by
whose side he marched. "Partner of mine once went in there. I think
meself that some fellow slipt up and drugged his beer, for when he
comes near the tail of the glass he feels kind of funny, ye know, and
he came outside. He was for walking out into the main streets, and
then he thinks some bull would arrest him for drunk and incapable, for
he could hardly stand; so he turns the other way and two fellows came
up to him and began talking to him, and asks him what's the matter, and
he tumbles to it and tries to walk back the other way again. One of
them fellows comes the one side of him and the other the other side,
and they says: 'You come along with us, where the bulls won't get you.'
And while he's puzzling out which is better, the bulls or them, ye
see--well, he doesn't know any more, ye see. And the next he does
know, he's wondering where he is anyhow, for the things he's after
seeing. It's the backs of the wharfs all upside down, ye see. He's
lying there with nothing on him but his pants. The hat on his head,
his shirt and his coat, with his discharge papers in it, they've
skinned off him; and his boots; and him after having a dollar stowed
away in each boot."
"Here you are, Scholar, then," said Mike, in advance, and swung into a
saloon, a ramshackle sawdusted place, where, behind a short counter, a
lean, sharp-faced man in shirt sleeves looked at them in a way
reminiscent of a weasel. All entered with a swagger, each man with
whatever change of face was his change of face before possible trouble.
Mike jerked up his right shoulder, jerked up his left, hitched his
belt, seemed to heave his chest up, and broaden his whole torso.
Cockney curved his back, curved also his arms, making the swing of
them, instead of by his side, left and right, in front of him, and
thrust his face forward, craning his neck. Michael put one hand in his
pocket, half-closed his eyes, and slowly, and without expression, his
guarded gaze roved from occupant to occupant of the place. The man
with the dangerously mad eyes, who it appeared was called Harry, but
was referred to simply as Queer, merely sneered slightly, an unpleasant
sneer, a one-sided sneer that showed a tooth. The Inquisitive One
danced into the place; his name had not yet transpired, but it seemed
to be "him," with an indicatory jerk of the thumb, at which he did not
take open umbrage, only now and then giving his roving glance from foot
to head of whoever thus referred to him. But if he danced in gaily he
was none the less alert.
Somebody spoke, and Mike interrupted with: "Where's your manners?
Can't you let the man that's going to stand treat ask you what you're
going to be after having, without shouting your order like that?" And
they lined up against the bar, on which the barman put the palms of his
hands, standing before them.
"Well, what will you have, Mike?" asked Scholar. It was the first time
he had given him his name, and Mike acknowledged it with a nod. He
turned to the bar-keeper.
"I'll have a schooner of beer," he said.
Michael, catching Scholar's eye, nodded to him, and then to the
bar-keeper. "The same for me," he said.
The barman looked along the row and received a series of nods. He
glanced at Scholar, elevating his brows, and Scholar inclined his head,
and the monster nominal glasses, but really glass jugs with handles,
came swift almost as conjuring, one after the other, on to the counter.
"Well, here's looking at ye," said Mike, "and good luck."
"Well, here's good luck," said Michael.
The phrase passed along, and the great jugs were held up and the
quaffing began. Mike drank a quarter of his, and then turned his back
to the bar, and surveyed the room. Over in a corner a faint
disturbance arose, sounds of altercation, somebody telling someone else
that he would push his face in. Mike looked into the corner,
impassive. He leant forward and dragged a high stool over to the
counter.
"Come and sit here beside me, Scholar," he said.
The narrow swing doors opened; a slight draught of air, cooler than the
air within, caused them to glance round. A furtive and evil face
showed for a moment in the middle of the strip of dark, blue night, and
then was withdrawn. Michael looked at Mike to see if he had noticed
that observer who came and went. Scholar sat up on the high stool.
"I don't know if you're fond of entering into scraps," said Mike
quietly. "But don't you do it. It's a way some of these fellows have.
Hearken to 'em now!"
This half-dozen or so of the "Push" of the _S.S. Glory_ applied itself
to its beer, and to talk, two by two. It had the air of partitioning
itself off from the rest of the house; it was a private party.
"Order!" cried the bar-keeper, shoving his chin at those in the noisy
corner. "Order, please!"
A man danced from the corner, beseeching another to "stand out."
Scholar glanced in the direction of the group from which he had come,
and it struck him that one or two faces there were turned more toward
the men of the _Glory_ than toward the combative person. At one small
table, that stood all by itself, there had been, so far, a newspaper
and two red fists; the newspaper came down now a little way and a face
looked over the top, a face as red as the fists that had shown on each
side. The bar-keeper's hands were flat on the counter again; he was
looking (almost stupidly it seemed) at the man who desired trouble, but
now his eye roved toward the face that appeared over the newspaper's
top.
"Order, sir!" he said again, looking once more at the man who had stood
up and forth to demand war.
Mike drained his glass; his eyes were very bright. He turned, and
leaning against the counter, looked at the belligerent one, met his
eye, cleared his throat oddly, and heaved up his chest. It struck
Scholar that the beer acted quickly upon Mike.
"Well, will _you_ fight me then?" said the man, catching Mike's eye.
Mike took a fierce step forward--he who had but a moment ago advised
Scholar to keep out of such trouble. The eyes of the bar-keeper and of
the man behind the newspaper again met. Down went the newspaper, up
came the man. He walked over to the blusterer and addressed a knothole
in the planks before his feet.
"I'll have to ask you to get out," he said, speaking to the knot-hole,
and then glanced at the man.
"I don't have to!"
The actions were then as quick as when two cats, the preamble over,
decide to come to grips. A whirl of arms and legs went down the middle
of the saloon, the swing doors swept left and right and closed again,
and the big man was alone now, his eye upon the doors as they wavered
to a standstill.
"There you are!" said Michael to Scholar. "That's what I told
you--this is a good class house."
"Drink up! Drink up!" ordered Mike, "and we'll have some more."
But four rational glasses of beer in one seemed sufficient for Scholar.
"We'd better get back I think," he said. "The rest of the cattle will
be coming on board."
"Oh, but indade I must stand treat now!" answered Mike.
"Can't you get a glass of beer here?" asked Scholar, accentuating the
"glass."
"Them is the glasses of beer here," said Mike. "Come along boys, drink
up!" he repeated; and he glanced at the door with a kind of hilarity in
his eye.
"When will she sail, do you think?" said the Inquisitive One.
"She can't go out before four or five in the morning," said Mike.
"Give us all the same again, Mr. Bar-keeper."
Those who had not finished made haste to do so, and the glasses were
replenished. The man who had thrown out the belligerent one had not
again taken his seat. He was looking sadly, moodily, at the swing
doors. He might have been brooding over some domestic trouble by the
look of him. Then he turned about, still looking heavily at the floor,
walked rearwards, hands behind back, and took up a position towards the
end of the saloon, legs spraddled, swaying up on his toes and coming
down on his heels again gently.
"He's after freezing them out," said Michael, seeing Scholar glance at
the man of moody weight. The noisy group had probably a like opinion
of his brooding proximity, drained its glasses, rose and passed to the
door. The heavy man walked slowly in the rear. It was composed of
some tough-looking units; but Scholar, who had come down from the
lumber camps of Michigan, was not intimidated by their scowling faces.
One of them jostled Cockney's elbow, and he turned round, lean and
humped like a weasel; but the big man, following just a step behind,
thrust his big hand between Cockney and the jostler, and admonished:
"Now then, now then. Move on, please!"
Michael nodded his head again to Scholar, jogged him with an elbow.
"See?" said he. "See? There's nothing on here between the people
behind the bar and the people in front, same as in some of them."
"I see," said Scholar.
Hardly had the last of these ugly fellows departed than the Inquisitive
One plucked his elbow and drew him aside, and Scholar was amazed to
notice that his utterance was thick as he whispered, a blend of
ingratiation and intimidation in his face: "How much are you getting
for the trip over?"
"Look here--none of that whispering!" said Mike, the heavy,
ready-to-smite look, with which he had watched the departure of the
dubious throng, still on his face. "If you fellows have anything to
say, say it. Here's a schooner of beer untouched, too!"
Scholar turned about.
"My inside isn't big enough to take another glass of that size," he
declared.
"Here's looking at you, then!" said Michael, and, lifting the glass
jug, he opened his throat, and holding it rigid as if it were a filler,
poured the contents down.
"There y'are!" said Mike. "There y'are! That's a gintleman! That's a
gintleman!" And there was a faint thickness in his speech too, as
though his tongue was spongy. "I was niver mixed up with such a push
in me life--what with whisperin' together and drinking another man's
beer."
Cockney broke out, in a jeering voice, eyeing the Inquisitive One and
Scholar: "How much are you getting for the trip? Tell me, and see if
yer getting something mor'n me."
"Oh, is that what he's after whispering?" said Mike.
The stubby Michael caught Scholar by the elbow and drew him away from
the inquisitor, who went back to his place at the bar to drain his
glass in an offended manner.
"You see, it's like this," began Michael, swaying ever so little
towards Scholar. "What these fellows do is this: one of them gets up a
row with you, and one of the others comes in as if he was separatin'
you. 'Pay no attention to him,' he says. 'Pay no attention to him.
You come along of me. You're a good man wantin' to fight when you're
insulted, but he's drunk. Pay no attention to him. Come along of me.'
And the other fellows say: 'Come along of us!' But they're all of the
one push, see? And when you go off with them to talk about the things
you would be doin' if they hadn't separated you, ye never know when
it's goin' to end. The way that them landsharks goes around looking
for honest seamen----"
A roaring bellow from Mike interrupted this. Evidently he had spoken
before.
"I'm askin' ye--I'm askin' ye--I'm askin' yez--are ye goin' to have
another drink?" he demanded. "Whisperin' like a lot of girls!"
While he was roaring thus, entered two men, blue-capped and shabbily
attired, clean as to face and half the neck, but showing tide marks of
scanty washings.
"Hallo, Mike!" one of them said.
"Well, bejabbers, and how's yourself?" answered Mike. Here was clearly
not a case of new and fraudulent friends, for Mike evidently knew them
both; having shaken hands with the first he required no introduction to
the second, extended his great hand, shook warmly, and cried: "How are
you? Have a drink with me!"
"Have a drink with _me_," said the man who had first hailed Mike, and
he ordered and paid for three glasses of beer. Suddenly he glanced
over his shoulder at the other men.
"Are these fellows----" he began.
"Oh, indade!" said Mike. "Thim fellers is aither too short in the neck
to take more, or they have saycrets to whisper."
Some of the men near the door had gone out, and now the door swung open
again, and one shouted: "Shake a leg, push of the _S.S. Glory_! Crew
of the _S.S. Glory_, shake a leg!"
"What's the time?" said Scholar, astonished. "It can't be late yet.
This place is still open."
"'E thinks 'e's in England," said Cockney, but joyful, not malevolent.
"The first thing yer notice in this 'ere country is them bills--'Open
day hand night'--and the next thing is the size of them glasses. They
look long at first, but you get used to everythink. I could do wiv 'em
longer." He drained his glass. "Longer fer me! Longer fer me!" he
began to sing, making for the door. Evidently the strains of a
Salvation Army song outside had come to his ears through the voices and
clatter of the place, for as the doors swung now with the men tumbling
out, Scholar heard the beat of a drum and voices singing: "That will be
glory, glory for me!" Cockney danced along the street, his wide
trousers flapping about his lean shanks, laughing and singing: "Longer
fer me! Longer fer me!"
"Come on, Mike!" shouted the last of them.
"Tell them to cast off if I don't come!" he replied. "I've met ould
friends--and I'm drinkin'."
"Come along, Mike," Michael hailed.
"Come along, Mike," implored Scholar. There was something like pity in
his eye for the great empty-stomached man. They were all
empty-stomached--that is so far as to food; and that beer had drugged
and stupefied them.
"To hell wid yez all!" cried Mike; and then through the haze in his
eyes he peered along the saloon at Scholar. "Stay wid me, Scholar,
stay wid me. Let the other fellows go."
"I want to cross over," said Scholar.
"Well, well--God bless you then. Don't let them fellers run it on ye,"
and Mike waved his hand and turned his back. Outside Michael held the
door open with a foot, and when Scholar came out, Michael, withdrawing
the foot, seemed to have some difficulty in balancing. Scholar caught
his arm.
"What are you holdin' me for?" said Michael. "There's nothing the
matter with me!"
He persisted with this remark all the way to the corner in the rear of
the others, varying it now and then with: "I'm all right." At the
corner were two men that Scholar recognized; one of them was the man
with whom Mike had had half a mind to grapple, the thrower-down of the
gauntlet; the other one was of the ejected gang. The former caught
Scholar's eye in the lamplight.
"Is the big fellow there still?" he asked.
Cockney, looking over his shoulder a few paces ahead, turned about,
pausing in his singing of "Longer fer me!" and came back, craning like
a thin duck.
"Wot does 'e say? Wot does 'e say?"
The two men eyed him coldly.
"Wot does 'e say?" repeated Cockney.
"He wants to know if Mike's in there still," said Michael.
"Wot does 'e want Mike for? Wot do you want Mike for?"
"We were speaking to this gentleman," said one of the men, but not the
one who had spoken to Scholar.
"O, you were, were you. Why can't yer speak for yerself?" and Cockney
turned to the other, he who had tried to lure Mike into combat. "Wot
do you want him for?"
"It's none of your business!" replied the man.
"Yus it is! We're shipmites! I'll give yer a bash in the ear-'ole for
tuppence! I'll put yer nose up among yer 'air for ten cents! Won't hi
do instead? We're shipmites, 'im and me."
The man lunged at Cockney to deliver a blow; and Cockney, with a
wriggle and a snarl, smashed a blow in his assailant's wind, and, next
moment, when they grappled, set his teeth in the man's wrist.
"Bull!" somebody shouted, so the farther combat of weasel and boar was
not to be seen, for the call of "bull!" was genuine. There he was,
there was the policeman pacing slowly towards them like a fate, broad,
determined, left hand at side nonchalant, right hand slightly raised,
nonchalant too, twirling his club gently at the end of its short
leather wristlet--like a stout Georgian dandy, swinging a cane.
None of the "Push" of the _S.S. Glory_ had any desire to see the inside
of a lock-up, and evidently the two men who had been curious regarding
Mike's whereabouts, were not in league with the police. By the time
that his slow patrol brought him to the end of the block, that bull had
the pavement to himself; the two "toughs" had disappeared in one of the
narrow streets, in one of its narrow entrances; the "Push" was
stumbling about over hawsers and round bales on the dark wharf-side.
The policeman, turning gently about, gave ear. He heard a thin sound
of fiddles, a sound of clapping and table-thumping behind closed
windows over at Dutch Ann's dance house; the quick, coughing sound of a
donkey-engine somewhere along the docks, and a voice chanting: "Up
again!"--pause--"All right! Up again!" Slow puffs of a locomotive
drew near, sepulchral cling-clang of the bell; there came a shout of
voices: "Yo-ho! Let her go!" a rattle of iron, a rattle of wheels over
cobbles; and all through this was a querulous lowing of cattle,
puzzled, despondent, irritable, after their week's journey from the
long green rolls of Alberta, from lush bottoms of the Milk River.
The Salvation Army people had gone; but away along towards where the
masts and the smoke-stack top of the _S.S. Glory_ showed over the
wharf, Cockney's voice sang high and piping and exulting: "Longer fer
me! Longer fer me!"
CHAPTER IV
Like unto a river in an arid land, like unto a river that dwindles
instead of increases, was the "Push" that headed for the _Glory_.
Smoke came, black and oily, into the electric-lighted night from her
smoke-stack; the cattle were all on board, but the tugs were not yet
alongside. The absence of the tugs sent many of the men back again.
Still, there was a sprinkling aboard.
Scholar found his way to the cattlemen's quarters, a large safe of a
place under the ringing iron poop, with bunks all round the walls and
all over the floor space, the latter ones fixed between iron stanchions
that ran from floor to ceiling. The place smelt already of fresh
cattle and of beer. Coming down the companionway to it, it seemed that
the few who were there were rather dropping an ordinary word into
strings of swear-words, than dropping a swear-word into their speech.
Men lay here and there, men sat here and there on bunks. Some he
recognized as having been at the signing-on; some faces were new to
him. Somebody asked him with many oaths who he was, what he wanted;
somebody else informed that inquirer that he must be drunk not to
recognize the man. One man deplored that the money was all gone, and
there could be no more drink; another voice announced that that didn't
matter, and need not be brooded over, being beyond mending. Scholar,
looking round, noted that on various of the unoccupied bunks there lay
some trivial article of apparel--on one a sock, on another a cap, and
on another one half of a pair of braces! Somebody fell down the stairs
and yelled, and a voice said: "Take that, then!" Men rose upon their
elbows and blinked; some rolled to their feet, rolled to the door.
There were sounds of wild scrimmage up and down the stairs. Scholar
noticed that many men seemed to take all this for granted; even men
whom it would be more fair to call "oiled" than drunk merely gave ear
and reclined again. The sounds of fighting waxed and waned, ceased,
dwindled out, abruptly began again, above--on the stairs. Now and then
the combat surged into the cabin, or a fringe of it, other men coming
down the stairs evidently taking sides in the original fight. One of
them reeled in, holding his head, sat down on a bunk, looked at his
knuckles, shook his hand, and blood dropped from it. He had evidently
given a blow, and had evidently received one, for his eye rapidly
disappeared as the flesh around it puffed.
Scholar felt a sense of relief when the great bulk of Mike appeared in
the shadows outside; yet when Mike fairly entered, and was fully
revealed in the hard glare of electric light that lit the place, he
knew not whether to be relieved or otherwise. Mike seemed to have
grown another inch, to have swelled, broadened, two or three; his eyes
seemed at once bleared and brightly dancing.
"Hallo, Scholar!" he hailed. "Have you claimed your bunk?"
Scholar did not understand.
"Put something on your bunk," said Mike. "Something that 'tain't worth
nobody's while to steal."
"'Ere yer are--reserved seats!" shouted Cockney, who had been asleep,
and now awoke.
Mike looked at a top bunk near the door and climbed on to it. Scholar
sat down on a lower one in the middle of the deck. Men came and went.
Several ugly pickpocket-faced youths clattered into the cabin, wandered
round looking at the bunks and the sleepers.
"I'm sorry I signed on!" grumbled one. "Didn't know it was quarters
like this."
He strolled round the cabin and went out. Mike sat up.
"Scholar, young feller," he said, "Scholar, young feller--listen to
what I'd be tellin' ye. When ye see fellers come in, and when ye hear
them say they're sorry they signed on the ship watch your pockuts.
They haven't signed on at all. They've only come aboard to see what
they can steal."
"Is Montreal Mike--is Montreal Mike there?" called a voice from above.
"It's me ould friend," said Mike, swung to the floor, swayed out.
"Come and have some more, Mike," said the voice above. "She won't sail
till four."
"Come ashore!" called Mike to Scholar.
"No, thanks."
"All right, then--watch your pockuts and keep an eye on my bunk. I
haven't reserved it. Tell thim it's Montreal Mike's, and he'll burst
any man he finds sitting on it."
There was a hailing on deck, a phrase repeated; it drew nearer, came
down the stairs, a chorus of: "Not sailing till four!" and a general
exodus from the cabin. Scholar stretched out upon his bunk--and
repented him that he had invited Mike and the others ashore, starting
them upon their jamboree. Nor could he ease himself by thinking that
if he had not done so someone else would; not even the thought that
sooner or later they would have gone ashore of their own accord,
finding that the others had left work, soothed him. The place rang
like the inside of a drum as the departing feet clattered over the
deck. The volume of sound died, the hammer of heels was intermittent.
More men, or youths, such as Mike had warned him of, came down into the
cabin and roved, searching, round it. Suddenly a man in one of the
mid-deck bunks--a top bunk--sat up and wailed: "Ma valise--gone--pooh!"
The half-dozen remaining sleepers awoke, sat up and asked him what he
was jabbering about. He waved his arms in a forward gesture,
signifying disappearance, flight.
"Ma valise--gone!" he repeated.
"He had a valise! Gee! Here's a feller had a valise!"
"Well, didn't yer never see a feller with a valise before?"
They rose and crowded round the bunk of the distracted Frenchman.
"When did yer miss it, Pierre?" asked one.
"Valise--gone!" said the Frenchman.
"_When_ did you miss it? Long ago?"
"Valise--gone! Pooh!"
"'E can't talk English! Let me try," said Cockney. "Wen your valise
gone, heh? Long time--you sleep? Wen you miss, heh? Wen your valise
pooh?" and Cockney very seriously imitated the gesture that signified
disappearance.
The Frenchman sat up and stared at him; the other well-meaning
drunkards clustered round, waiting the reply to Cockney's question.
"Gee! Can't anybody talk his lingo? Where's that feller Jack--Boston
Jack? He can talk it."
"Liverpool Jack you mean--a long, thin feller. Walks like this." The
speaker drew up his jacket behind so that it wrinkled round his waist,
and canted back his shoulders.
"That's 'im. He can quelle-heure-est-il all right."
It struck Scholar that the Frenchman's English might be none so bad.
"Have you been asleep?" he asked.
The Frenchman looked at him with something of astonishment.
"Yes, I sleep," he replied. "Some time, I know not how long." He put
his hand to his watch pocket, then sat bolt upright again. "My watch!"
he screamed. "My watch gone! Pooh!" and he waved his hands.
Cockney was now hanging stupidly round one of the stanchions at the
foot of the Frenchman's bunk, looking on as might a drunk doctor at a
patient.
"Your watch pooh?" he said. "O, isn't that a 'ell of a shame! I once
'ad a watch meself." He slipped down the stanchion as though it were a
greasy pole, so far as the top bunk would allow him, and laying his
forehead on the back of his hand made a sound as of anguish. The
Frenchman's eyes were upon him, staring; he looked at Scholar; he
pointed a finger at Cockney's bowed head.
"Dronk? Eh?" he said. But he was not really thinking about Cockney's
state. "What I do?" he asked of the rivet-studded ceiling, and
answered himself: "Nozing!"
"Was there anything important in your valise?" asked Scholar.
"Important? Suit of clothes, for go home."
One of the men clapped his shoulder.
"Never mind, Pierre," he said. "Never mind. You've a shoot of clothes
on. What's the matter with them? They're all right!"
Pierre just glanced at this man, and went on to Scholar:
"Lettairs--from my vife."
Cockney had recovered sufficiently by this to raise his head and
explain to the others, as if translating: "That's his wife! 'E's got a
wife! Too bad."
"Militar' papers," said the Frenchman.
"You come ashore with me," advised Scholar.
"Ashore?"
"Yes, we'll go to the police office."
"Police--eh? Non, non! Not leesten. 'Valise gone!' they say. 'You
go with cattle? No matter!'"
It struck Scholar that there was much truth in this. One of the men
seemed to see it otherwise.
"You go with this fellow, Pierre," he said. "You go police with this
fellow. He talkee alla same upper ten. You savvey? You savvey toff
in disguise?"
"Toff? Oh, me elbow!" shouted somebody, which seemed an insulting
phrase in the society in which they moved. There was an offer, on
Scholar's behalf, to paste a face because of it, an acceptance, a
scrimmage. "Don't! Don't! Don't!" cried Scholar, and they stopped,
drew apart.
"We'll go ashore," he said again to the Frenchman.
"No, no matter. They say," and Pierre waved a hand at the recent
fighters and the watchers of the fighters, "even if they leesten--'No
good; bottom of the dock!' Hay? No matter!" and he lay back again.
There was a slight movement of the ship that caused the "Push"--those
that were left of it--to stagger. Somebody outside said: "We're off!
Is the push aboard? Where's Jack? Where's Johnnie? Where's Mike?"
"Mike, is it?" answered a voice. "Here he is. Who is the man that has
a valise?" and he appeared in the doorway with a cut across his
forehead from the hair to the temple. He was carrying a small
suit-case.
"Glory!" shouted Cockney. '"Ere's yer old valise, Pierre!"
"Ma valise!"
"Is it yours? Well, if ye had been an Englishman, or a Scotsman, or an
Irishman, or a Bostoner, I would have had to hit ye for havin' a
valise, but seein' ye're a Frenchman and all alone like, here's your
ruddy trunk!" and he laid it upon the bunk.
"Your head's bleedin', Mike," said one of the men.
"Is it me head?" asked Mike. "So is me fist. I met the spalpeen
runnin' down the gangway when I'm runnin' up. 'Where ye goin' wid the
trunk?' I says, and he swings it up and hits me over the head wid it,
and I knocks his teeth out for him. Whin ye see luggage goin' off a
ship after the Blue Peter's up, its a good rule ivery toime to grapple
wid the man that's carrying it."
There was a rattle of heels again overhead, a fresh outcry; sounds of
another scrimmage came down to them. For a moment it seemed Mike heard
a call to battle; then he remembered his dignity.
"D'ye hear them?" he said. "D'ye hear them? A scrappin', disorderly
crowd!"
CHAPTER V
Many of the men fell asleep, Scholar among them, exhausted by the
strain of the day and evening. He dreamt that he was back again in a
bunkhouse of Michigan, and came half-awake, thinking that the forest
was afire, then realised where he was, in this Bedlam, and was
crucified upon regret. If only he had not made that offer to stand
treat! He moaned; it was an anguish to him, for he had not lived even
his brief years without knowing kindliness when he met it; and these
fellows, whatever their vocabularies, their moral code, their falls
from it, their capacity to live up to it, had treated him kindly. He
would like to begin all over again with them, to go back twelve hours
in his life and theirs, and stroll towards them feeling the air again
for the method of approach, outside the barrier at the end of The Saint
Lawrence Shipping and Transport Company's shed. Tortured, he fell
asleep again, and the next he knew was the sound of voices. Perhaps
all had their dreams, or nightmares when that sound brought them from
sleep proper into a state of half awake and half asleep.
"Well, wot do yer want ter see 'im for, any'ow?"
"He is here, is he? I want to see him."
"I say 'e's a-sleepin'! Any man as wants to see Scholard 'as got ter
tell me wot 'e wants ter see 'im for!"
"It's none of your business--I want to see him. Is he there?"
"You tell me wot you want ter see 'im for, and I'll see if it's worth
disturbin' 'im for. I'm his bleedin' secretary, I am."
Scholar came wide awake, and rose upon an elbow, to find a semi-circle
of backs turned to him, Cockney's back among them; and Cockney's arm
was reaching out and brushing those of his shipmates who stood near, or
part brushing, part elbow-plucking, part signing to them in an
endeavour to form them up between Scholar's bunk and a man in the
doorway. Up sat Scholar. He had seen enough of ugly fighting during
the last few hours to feel a yearning for a life, nay, an eternity, of
peace; but he was in the pack, and he must not let Cockney take the
chances of an encounter on his behalf. As the man in the door--and he,
too, had a backing of friends--advanced upon Cockney, Scholar sat up.
He had the strong resolution to, as they say out West, "make good"
here; and it was a resolution that advertised itself on his face as he
rose and swung forward.
"All right, Cockney!" he said. "I'm awake."
The forming segment of circle broke. Cockney looked over his shoulder.
"That's hall right. You ain't one of hus. I know 'ow ter deal wiv
these fellers. We're shipmites, ain't we?"
"Do you want to speak to me?" said Scholar, looking keenly at the
advancing tough.
"Oh! No! They told me a man called Scollard was aboard. I wanted to
see a feller called Scollard!" This in a grumbling voice.
"O, yus! This hain't the feller, eh? No! Am _hi_ any use? Would you
like to push _my_ face in, eh?"
A voice above shouted: "Come on, mate, come on! She's pushing off!"
and the man who wanted to see Scollard hastened away, drawing off his
forces in the doorway.
"Thought we were off already!" said Cockney.
"Thank you very much for that," said Scholar. "Only a man must look
after himself of course."
"Yus, that's all right. Good luck! You ain't 'ust one of us; you
don't know the ropes--not 'ere, any'ow. Good luck, mate."
He and those others who had power over their legs, climbed to the deck,
Scholar accompanying them. The former jogglings must have been merely
due to the casting loose of one or two hawsers. A ladder still
stretched from ship to wharf. "Come on, come on there. Get ashore!"
the bo'sun was shouting at its top. "You fellers had no right aboard
here anyhow." The visitors hastened over the side and down the ladder,
those of them who saw a policeman at the shed end (looking up with that
frowning and sidewise consideration that suggests: "Now I don't know
but what I should run you fellows in! You look as if there might be a
charge about you!") going down with anxious precipitancy. The last
reached the wharf. Two men came up, climbed aboard--the pilot and a
ship's officer. The ladder was hauled away, the last hawser was cast
loose, and with a tug ahead and a tug astern the _S.S. Glory_ moved
from the wharf sideways like a great iron wall drifting away from a
great stone one. The space of dirty water between, with pieces of
straw, bits of wood, and such flotsam of the docks--a sodden apple or
two, and a potato--rapidly widened. The lights alongshore looked pale
and insignificant as the dawn spread; those in the low-browed windows
of the waterfront saloons that could be espied over the leaden-hued
roofs had lost their glare. Men below, those who could stand, feeling
sure now that she was off, came on deck to double-shuffle and cluster
on the poop, to cheer and scream, to wave their hands shorewards, as
though they saw a multitude of friends there waving farewell, though
really there were none.
Before the cheering was over a little unpleasantness began between Mike
and Michael. In all societies, in all walks of life, there are certain
statements that are considered insulting; but statements that in one
stratum are considered insulting are, in another, looked upon as merely
amusing; in yet another they are unheard, unknown, and so there is no
opinion on them. What should a passivist, in any walk of life, do when
some neighbour of his paddock discharges at him the supreme term of
contempt of that special paddock? They who cheered the dock roofs
turning grey in the morning, and the early stevedores, and the few late
night-birds, had now something close at hand to attract their
attention. Michael and Mike, on the poop now, met for the first time
since Mike, in the saloon ashore, had preferred the company of his two
friends to that of the "Push." And Michael, extremely fuddled, vaguely
remembered that he had some grievance against Mike. Mike leant against
a rail that ran athwart the ship, dividing the stretch of upper deck
from the stubby semi-circle of poop. His hands were behind him,
holding the rail as he leant against it. He had had a short sleep
since coming aboard, and his drunkenness was stale. The ale within
Michael, on the other hand, had not yet come to the height of its
action.
"What," he was asking Mike, "are you a-doing wearing a seaman's cap?"
Mike turned his head from surveying the shed roofs, lightly glanced
down at Michael, but did not fix him, turned his head the other way.
"A seaman's cap, I say!" Michael repeated.
Mike shook his head, as if a fly had landed on his face.
"Eh?" said Michael.
Mike looked down upon his stubby and sturdy compatriot as a Saint
Bernard dog looks down on a snarling Pomeranian between its forepaws.
"I _am_ a seaman," he replied at last.
"You're a liar!" said Michael, which in that stratum of society is no
more considered, even by those who are not passivists, as a call for
the mailed fist than, in another, is "Pardon me--have you verified
that?"
"I'm tellin' ye," said Mike.
"Let me see your discharges then," demanded Michael.
Mike tossed his head with an air of "This man bores me," tossed it to
right, and from left breast pocket drew forth a folded bundle of Board
of Trade discharges, and held them up.
"Huh!" grunted Michael. "Cattleman."
"Seaman I'm tellin' ye," Mike repeated.
"What are you a-going over as a cattleman for, then?" asked Michael.
"I'm tellin' ye I have some seaman discharges among theyse."
"Well then, you're a cattleman!"
"Yes, yes, quite so. All right."
"You're a cattleman."
"Yes, yes. Have it that way, thin."
"You're a dam' cattleman."
Mike stretched his head up as does one who wears a tall collar when the
collar's edge annoys his neck.
"Now, now," he said. "Now, now! You'll be after annoying me."
"A dam' cattleman," reiterated Michael, "with one shirt!"
"Quite so. Have it your own way."
"One shirt--a dirty shirt."
Mike unloosened his right hand from the taffrail that it was again
gripping, threw forward his left shoulder, and then, instead of
hitting, he wrung his hands, held them high, rubbed the palms together
in a kind of anguish, smashed the butt of his right hand into the palm
of his left, and "Michael," he said, "you're drunk. Ye'd better go
below. Have a sleep, have a sleep."
"I'm not drunk!" cried Michael, and hit, smash upon Mike's breast. And
then out of the crowd leapt upon him--Cockney.
"Is it a fight yer want?" asked Cockney.
Neither was so drunk that he could not hit, feint, parry; the others
circled.
"Now, now," said Mike. "See! Pull them apart!" But it was too late;
they had grappled.
Now people make laws, and they become the vogue; you are judged by
them, willy-nilly. If you cannot box, as boxing is taught in the
gymnasium, and find yourself set upon by a boxer, you will be
ostracised in some walks of life if you deliver him a kick in the
shins; or, should he fall, if you knuckle his wind so that he may lie
there long enough for you to beat your retreat from one skilled in the
"science," you will be ostracised for that; you must box him according
to the rules. But in this walk of life, upon the poop of the _S.S.
Glory_, it is a case of top dog anyhow. Mr. Smithers, on the docks,
newly arrived to see the ship clear, put teeth together, looking up,
and made the hissing sound through his teeth that a stoic makes when
operated on without an anaesthetic. For as the two men reeled to the
taffrail, and the onlookers there fell asunder to give them a full
field, they were displayed to the one or two persons who looked up from
the wharf front, displayed as on a high set stage, Michael with
Cockney's head under his left arm, an attitude, by the way, permitted
in some gymnasia, taboo in others--for there are "sets" there too.
Michael was swinging a right in upon the top of Cockney's head, when
suddenly he saw the taffrail and thought it would serve as well,
shifted his hold, and with both hands drove Cockney's head, as if it
were a turnip, against the middle rail. It was this which caused the
first hiss and spasm ashore. It would have finished most men. You
could have laid a finger in the indentation that the rail made in
Cockney's skull; but as he took the blow, refusing to be stunned, like
a tough, wild beast, he screamed, and thrust a thumb upward into
Michael's eye, even while Mike, Scholar, Pierre and the Inquisitive One
were hauling them asunder. Back went Cockney, flopped on the deck, and
held head in hands. There! They were apart. And suddenly, over the
taffrail and down the curve of the ship to the tow rope that went to
the tug astern, Michael made a kind of scramble and scuttle.
[Illustration: There! They were apart.]
"Grab that man!" shouted Smithers from the dock. "He'll fall on the
screws!"
Michael, upon all fours, had caught the tow rope and now swung himself
down, shouting: "I've been shanghaied! I won't sail on the _Glory_!"
He spun slightly left and right, clutching the rope, so that those who
craned under the bottom rail to try to grab him, and those who looked
up from the wharf, had glimpse, time about, of his ghastly face, and
the eyeball protruding like the yolk of an egg. One man was now on his
belly under the taffrail, stretching to grasp Michael, but he slithered
slightly forward on the curve to the hull.
"Somebody hold my legs!" he shouted. It was Scholar. The Inquisitive
One promptly sat down upon his feet. Mike had taken off his boots, and
was saying, one leg swung over the rail: "Here, some of youse--hold my
hand, will yez."
"Look up!" came a voice. It was the Man with the Hat. He had made a
slip-noose on the end of a rope. It hissed down and up. On shore
Smithers was shouting to the people in the tug astern: "Keep that rope
taut!" for the rope to which Michael hung was falling slack. "He'll be
down on the screws!" But the noose was now round Michael's waist, and
in their rejoicing the "Push" laid hold of the hither end of the rope
that the Man with the Hat tossed amongst them, and with a "Yo-ho!" they
put as much muscle into hauling the human being aboard as if he had
been a stern anchor.
"Easy, easy--for God's sake!" came a quiet voice to rear, a voice that
compelled attention because of the very loudness of the others. It was
Candlass; and behind him was the captain's steward, who was a good deal
more than a first aid man. They secured Michael as he was dragged over
the rail, and walked him forward along the narrow passage left between
the sheep-pens that crowded the upper deck.
"Bring that other man here," ordered Candlass over his shoulder.
"I'm all right!" said Cockney, standing up. He put up his hand to feel
his head, and laid a finger into the impression of the taffrail.
Everybody seemed a little more sober after that. The docks receded.
Montreal rose up behind them. Sea gulls that had come into port with
other ships cried one to another overhead, and came to their poising
station above the stern of the _S.S. Glory_.
CHAPTER VI
Scholar need not indeed have worried, telling himself that he it was
who started the pandemonium. Those who had accompanied him were but a
few, and sooner or later they would surely have marked the absence of
the others and gone ashore to share their pleasures. In the whole
"Push" upon the _Glory_, as she churned slowly down the river, there
was hardly a sober man. And virulent, not ecstatic, are the nepenthes
offered, to the men who go down to the sea in ships, along the
waterfront by the people ashore. Some were still in fighting key; many
were in a condition that recalled to whosoever drew near them the adage
to let sleeping dogs lie; many were in a kind of mad misery. Perhaps a
third showed wounds, as of battle, cuts and bruises. The veering wind
about the poop carried mostly swear-words, and these more obscene than
blasphemous, to the captain and the pilot on the bridge. The pilot
paid no heed; the captain only looked now and then over his shoulder,
like one thinking: "Yes, just as usual!" instead of: "That's rather
bad." He was held aloft upon the bridge as are spectators in the
zoological gardens above the bear pits.
The Man with the Hat, sober and solitary, reclined on a bale of hay to
leeward of the smokestack on the upper deck--the sheep deck; its whole
length was crowded with sheep in pens, only narrow passage-ways being
left between the packed central pens and the narrow pens along the
side--these latter being protected from overmuch wind by canvas
dodgers. Jack--he who spoke French--and Jack's partner sat laughing
and talking alone, telling tales of adventurous lives one to the other,
the glitter of those who look upon the wine while it is red still in
their eyes, and as they sat nursing their knees, and colloguing, the
wind plucked the frayed edges of their pants. Jack pulled his hat down
upon his head with a gesture in keeping with that manner of his as of a
dandy in his sphere. It is not to be imagined that he had "come down."
Men do come down, of course. He was just a hard case, not beyond
helping himself to shoes from a shoe-shop door, not beyond looking upon
a derelict suburbanite, crossing vacant lots to his home, with unsteady
steps, late at night, as a fair prey, if Johnnie was with him. In his
walk of life such a way of replenishing the exchequer was considered no
more inestimable that in another walk of life is a little sharp
practice in business. There they sat, laughing and chatting.
Pierre had drawn apart, elbows on the rail, his shoulders suggesting
that he would fain have them hide him from his fellows. He looked at
the shores spreading out, onward and onward, as the _Glory_ threshed
along and the tugs left her--a shore that Nature, and the inhabitants,
make to look much like certain parts of the real and original France.
There were the poplar rows, the little belfrys, the little French
villages. If his knowledge of English prevented him from understanding
all the obscene oaths behind him, so much the better for him and his
dream of the Picardy home.
As for the Inquisitive One--he was not, of course, only inquisitive,
but was thus introduced to help to distinguish him from others in first
telling of the "Push"--he shuffled round among the rest, hands in
pockets, jerking left shoulder forward, jerking right shoulder forward,
very young, very crass, trying to keep drunk by acting drunk. If a
policeman had stepped up to him he would have been sober on the
instant. He was always scared of policemen, unlike men like Jack, who
were merely alert to them. There were a great many others, many of
whom need not be mentioned in detail, because as the voyage went on
they were not considered so by Mike, and he was a man worth heeding in
his own walk of life. They were just "them" or "youse"; if referred to
in the singular they were "him" or "you," with an indicative jerk of a
thumb, or pointing of a finger. They did not even rise to
nicknames--shrimpy-looking lads who could pick pockets and knew the
soup kitchens of all the Atlantic ports.
The sounds of discord ebbed; and now more plaintive than irritable was
the lowing of the cattle on the main and lower decks. On the upper
deck sheep gave voice here and yonder, though the majority were quiet.
It was as if every now and again they thought it over and gave a little
bleat of "Why?" Scholar, stealing away from the diminishing group on
the poop, easily, not to attract attention, went forward along the
upper deck and looked at the faces of these woolly creatures with
something like affection, as a man disgusted in the society in which he
finds himself will welcome his dog, or a lonely woman the upturned face
of a cat.
The day wore on, the lowings increasing, the cursings decreasing. The
warm sun helped to stupefy farther the drink-stupefied. They had now
the appearance, most of them, that comes to those who have missed sleep
through some long and harassing vigil. Taunting smells of food wafted
aft from the galley ventilator; but there was none for the cattlemen.
They were left alone on the railed-off poop and in the cabin under it,
as in a cage and a wild beast pit. The Man with the Hat, lying on his
chest, a straw in his mouth, near the smoke-stack, rolled over and
pulled his belt up two holes and looked round casually, wondering when
something was going to happen; and then there appeared, in the narrow
path to starboard between the sheepcots, John Candlass, with his air of
reserve; and behind him, lurching, Rafferty, axe in hand.
There was a difference between these two cattle bosses; Candlass had
come into the business--no one knows why but Candlass--and Rafferty had
mounted in it, and, mounting, he had not discarded the ancient custom
known as "tanking up" on the day that the ship clears the wharf.
Nominally they were colleagues, but his clear eye and brain made
Candlass actually the boss aboard and Rafferty, red-eyed and
swollen-faced, was as lieutenant. Smithers, of the Saint Lawrence
Shipping and Transport Co., Ltd., wished they might meet more mysteries
like Candlass, but such mysteries were scarce, or did not come their
way.
[Illustration: Asked of the evil smelling darkness below many insulting
questions.]
Candlass, coming to the poop, poked his head down the companion-way and
said sharply: "All cattlemen on deck!" Then he stood back. He seemed
to pay hardly any heed to whether they came promptly or leisurely. To
Rafferty's mind they did not come quickly enough, so he leapt to the
companion-way and asked of the evil-smelling darkness below many
insulting questions. His vocabulary put to the blush the vocabularies
of all the others. Candlass glanced sideways at him, and, stepping a
little more close, in a low voice, that caused Rafferty to come near to
hear what was said, engaged him in conversation. Rafferty, drunk or
sober, was rather proud of his job; he had climbed to the top, as may
the reporter to be editor, the bank clerk to be manager, the stable
mucker to be ranch foreman. But Candlass was a celebrated boss, and it
was an honour for any other boss to chat with him, or to sail with him.
Even Rafferty drunk did not forget that, and Rafferty only three sheets
in the wind, as he was at present, was none averse to letting the men
come up as they would, when all could see the terms he was on with
Candlass. Not that his ways were Candlass's ways; he esteemed
Candlass's control, but would not imitate--indeed could not. There was
always some intimidating weapon in Rafferty's hand; but Candlass's
hands generally lay negligently one within the other behind his back.
One may suspect that he felt a slight pity for Rafferty rather than
contempt, and would have been sorry to see him do a murder in his cups;
looked upon him somewhat as Scholar, coming aft now from the
sheep-cotes amidships, looked upon the large, dishevelled Mike who
emerged on to the deck, scoop-cap awry on his ruffled hair, eyes
puckered to the sunlight after the dusk of the cabin, licking dry lips,
working dry tongue, disgustedly grunting "Ach!" over his condition and
his stale feeling--referred to by callous topers as "the morning
after." Candlass produced a coin and handed it, perhaps by some
convention of courtesy, to Rafferty; Rafferty rejected it with a "Go
ahead!" and Candlass tossed.
"Heads!" cried Rafferty.
It came down tails. Candlass pointed to Mike, and Mike made four steps
of it, with a touch of swagger, to one side. Rafferty pointed to
Cockney, who staggered to the other side. Candlass said, very quietly:
"All right. You can pick your own men now!" for these were "straw
bosses"--Mike under Candlass, Cockney under Rafferty. Neither Cockney
nor Mike had a coin left, so Cockney stooped and picked up a splinter
of wood, and, laying it between his two palms, held them forth.
"Sharp--blunt!" said Mike, tapping first the fingers then the wrist of
the covering hand, which Cockney then lifted. The pointed end of the
splinter was toward the fingers, the blunt toward the wrist. Mike
looked at Scholar, but at that moment there arrived, from his patching
and his sleep amidships under the steward's care, Michael, one eye
under a blind, the other riveting an imploring gaze upon Mike.
"Come over, Michael," said Mike, in a tone of resignation.
"I'll have----" snapped Cockney, and out shot his hand and he pointed
to Scholar.
"No, you won't!" roared Mike.
"It's his pick!" shouted Rafferty
"I don't give a curse," said Mike. "I'll----"
"You'll do _wot_?" Cockney interrupted.
"Can't do it, Mike," said Candlass quietly, "it's his pick."
"I'm after doin' this," persisted Mike doggedly, "for everybody's sake.
I want Scholar meself, but I'm takin' Michael from him, for they've
sane enough of each other. He can pick somebody else for Michael, if
he's half a man, and then I'll begin afresh with Scholar. Come over
here, me lad; ye're picked."
"Oh, hall right!" said Cockney, "There's somethink in that."
Rafferty, with an evil oath, demanded Scholar, and Cockney, for a
moment, had the air of veering round again, then he grinned and was
silent. Candlass said something that nobody caught.
"Oh, all right--go ahead!" growled Rafferty. "Let Mike have him, and
you take that fellow there with the hat--and that thin fellow with the
impudent eyes." This was Jack, who could quelle-heure-est-il.
Mike then picked another; Cockney looked round, and Jack's partner, of
his own accord, stepped over beside Jack.
"What t'ell? O, hall right!" said Cockney.
Things went fairly smoothly thereafter, till it came to the last shamed
few--at least most of them seemed shamed; only a small number appeared
to look upon the lack of desire for them with unmixed levity.
Apparently the sign-on had been an even one; two men were left. It was
Mike's choice. Suddenly an odd cough drew everybody's attention; and
there, foolish behind them, was the youth in the long coat, the
spectacles, and the leggings. Mike stared at him.
"Oh, be jabbers! Come here, me lad!" he said. Some laughed; others
said: "What the hell are you laughin' at the poor feller for?" Mike
stepped forward and put a hand on Four Eyes' shoulder, and an arm out
behind the two remaining pick-pockets who stood together, and herded
them, all three, like a man driving pigs, herded them across to
Cockney's side. Cockney's receding under jaw hung down, his eyes
goggled under the bandage he had tied over his forehead, covering the
mark of the taffrail.
"I give ye a prisent of them," said Mike. "The three of 'em." Some of
his underlings grumbled. He looked slowly round at them. "Whaat?" he
asked. "Would ye not prefer to be short-handed than disgraced?"
"That's hall right!" cried Cockney. "Any ole thing fer me!"
So that was all quite satisfactory.
CHAPTER VII
The two bosses looked at their men, observing how some stood erect, if
bleary, but how others swayed and propped themselves against taffrail
or neighbour.
"I think," said Candlass, "if you have the bigger bunch, Rafferty, that
I've the pull on you for the sober ones."
"Oh, indeed," answered Rafferty. "They'll be sober and sorry before we
strike Liverpool." Some of the men flinched, and some showed their
teeth in wry smiles; one or two, men of the order of Jack, stuck hand
in jacket pocket easily, cast their heads back, and smiled secret
smiles at the river.
"Those of you that are sober," said Candlass to his gang, "come
forward." And he walked away. He was taken at his word; not all
followed. Half-way along the deck he turned and glanced meditatively
at those who elected to call themselves drunk, and as he glanced at
that little party thus it became aware of him, and was troubled, and
one or two more disentangled themselves and followed him. There was a
slight puckering upward of his under lip as he considered each of
these, and to each he delivered a brief nod, and they knew they were
marked men. Rafferty had other ways of doing it.
"Drunk and sober," he said, "get forward!" and shepherded them before
him, along the passage-way between the sheep-pens on the other side.
One man turned and looked at him insolently; and Rafferty, elbowing
ahead, plucked his sleeve, and leaning forward, whispered in his ear,
then thrust him along the deck violently.
"What did he say to you?" asked another.
"I'll tell you what I said to him," said Rafferty, "and to you," he
added as if biting the words. And stepping up close he muttered
something with a virulent expression. The men crowded forward,
growling.
"What did he say?" they asked.
One of them--he who was the subject of Rafferty's second whispered
advice--explained: "He said: 'I'll not give you a chanst to make any
reports, if that's in your mind. I'll get ye alone between decks, and
you'll be having an accident. Somebody will find ye had a severe
fall.'"
"Come hon!" cried Cockney, for the men delayed again. "Come hon!"
"Who do you think you are?" said the man whose eye Cockney caught as he
spoke.
Cockney, a mere "straw boss," had no scruples. He leapt at the man,
both hands at his neck tight, crashed him to the deck and knelt
violently in his stomach.
"Talkin' ter _me_!" he said, coming erect, and the gang moved forward,
while he who had fallen sat up, gasping for breath.
"Shake a leg!" ordered Rafferty, behind, and the last men, at sound of
that voice, hastened forward, then delayed again, made a jam. It was
Jack and Jack's partner who were the cause of that; and it was
intentional on their part. Rafferty's eye sighted an end of wire rope.
He lifted it and whirled it down upon the back of the last man.
"He hit me!" yelled the man.
"Get on!" said Rafferty.
A man ahead pushed Jack's partner.
"Gettin' me blimed fer this," he said. "It's you."
"Oh, you coward!" sneered Johnnie.
"Me?" And the man who had been called "coward" smashed his fist into
Johnnie's face. A fierce fight followed; they reeled to and fro,
falling this way and that about the sheep-pens. This was a different
matter for Rafferty. He charged upon both.
"Come siperate!" he shouted, but they did not come separate. With the
wire rope he flailed them till one relaxed and fell over, moaning,
among the sheep. Johnnie turned, belligerent still, but crash on his
knuckles came the wire rope, and he was disabled. And on went all
again, sullen, and some in pain. Candlass's gang had already
disappeared forward and gone down to the main deck.
"Can you work a donkey-engine?" said Candlass to Scholar.
"I might manage," answered Scholar. "Looks fairly simple, if you show
me how. Hate machinery, all the same." He smiled.
The Man in the Hat looked at both so expressionless that Scholar took
the lack of expression to signify contempt.
"You?" asked Candlass, elevating his brows.
"I guess," said the Man with the Hat, and strolled over to the engine.
"All right, Mike. Get busy there--get up that hay."
Rafferty's yelling gang came down to the main deck, and passed on, with
more friction on the way, to the lower deck. Candlass watched it, head
on side, watched it meditatively as it progressed a few yards at a
time; had the faintest little snort and a pucker of the corner of his
lips, as some particularly insolent one received the wire rope, for
Rafferty had now cast aside all technical scruples. Cockney was in his
element. Jack swung along, his handsome and evil face sneering--a
sneer that Cockney averted his eyes from quickly each time that he
encountered it as he played lieutenant to Rafferty. They descended
somehow or other into the hold, going down like frogs. Some seemed to
be kicked over. Jack's partner, Johnnie, went down the ladder with one
hand thrust in his jacket as in a sling. He turned at the ladder and
looked at Cockney, who stood there to see all below, went over very
self-collectedly, raising his head at Cockney and then at Rafferty,
something like a duck after spooning water. Candlass's gang above,
looking over, opined each to each that there was going to be a hot time
in that half of the "Push." They were already, though they knew it
not, under the influence of their mysterious boss. Even their voices
were more subdued.
"O!" said Cockney, suddenly. This was to the man in the long coat. He
stood aside to let him go down with plenty of space to manage his
coat-tails and the buckles of his leggings. Even Rafferty slackened
his grip on the wire rope, put a steadying hand on the top of the
ladder, and watched the descent with an "Aisy, me lad!" as if me lad
was a valuable cow.
There was a hiss of steam, a rattle of cogged wheels; and two hooks at
the end of a chain swung down. "Out below!" went the cry above.
Somebody below yelled up: "All right! I'll paste you later when I see
you!"--"Get on with your work!" roared Rafferty. "I see you sitting
there on them bales underneath. Roll them out." Up came the bales,
and down anon swung the hooks; up again came the bales. Once the hooks
slipped, the bales fell, one nearly on a man. At that Candlass
disappeared from the main deck, reappeared presently on the lower deck,
went over the hatch-side half-way down the ladder, and stood there
looking at the gang below. Rafferty made no objection. "A dirty,
drunken crowd," was all he volunteered. "It would sober some of them
to have a bale on their head." Candlass climbed up again after
exerting his influence by merely being there, and flicking his hands
together as he came to the deck, remarked: "They'll all be sober before
long, and no excuse." This saying was passed round from one to
another. It suggested, as those who knew Candlass of yore agreed, that
Candlass had his own point of view, and that only upon a man who had
full use of his faculties would he be utterly severe in case of
wrong-doing. Those whom he had "marked down" felt troubled in their
hearts, as do discovered truants whose names have been handed in to the
Head.
"Let me have an axe up," said Candlass presently, on the main deck
again, looking down at Rafferty. Rafferty glared round for his axe,
forgetting where he had put it, found it, and Candlass, turning to his
men, gave a jerk of his head to one of the marked youths, and pointed
down at the axe.
"Do you mean that I've got to go down for it?" asked the young man.
Candlass's lips tightened for all reply, and he seemed to read the
man's eye. The man hastened away to the deck below, and when he
returned with the axe Candlass looked at him again thoughtfully, then
pointed to the bales strewn on the deck.
"Do you mean----" began the man, and his face was insolent.
Candlass pointed to the bales again, and the man walked over to them
and began to smite upon the wires, which sprang apart.
"Here, the rest of you," said Candlass sharply, "just hustle that hay
all along the alleyways."
"Is that enough hay on your deck, Candlass?" came Rafferty's voice.
"That will do," Candlass replied, and then quietly, at least
comparatively speaking, and certainly expeditiously, to and fro on the
main deck went Candlass's men, carrying the hay. They even began to be
jolly at their work, throwing the fodder each to each, and the great
horned beasts strained their necks and lowed, horns meeting horns
across the alleyways. The men had to arm themselves with sticks to
beat back the heads, for the armfuls that were carried to the extreme
ends were sorely diminished by snatchings on the way. Candlass
remained by the hatch, signing with a hand when to hoist, when to
steady, when to let go, for the Man with the Hat worked on at the
engine, bringing up bales to Rafferty's deck.
There was a sense of famine in the crew by the time all this work was
done. The cattle were fed, but not they. The drink was out of them
and there was no food in them, and they went aft to their safe of a
cabin and picked, snarlingly, the men who were to go for meat and bread
to the galley and the baker. They crowded, still snarling, round the
tub containing the tin plates, forks and spoons, and when the food
arrived they swooped round it, all talking and yelling. Mike's voice
boomed high.
"Yis, youse all sober up for your chewings, but youse can't sober up
fer work, some of yez."
"That's so," came Cockney's chirruping shriek. "Them that wasn't
workin' jest now shouldn't git anythink ter eat."
Obscene comments on the food were voiced.
"Oh, kickin', kickin'!" said Mike. "You deserve to be given just the
Board of Trade Allowance, the way youse are kickin'! Are youse aware
that there's more rations there than the Board of Trade grants ye?" He
turned to explain to Michael, friendly: "Them fellers whose mothers was
rakin' in the ash bucket for a crust would be kickin' if they sat down
to ate this day with the captain."
"_He_ gets enough," growled a flat-browed fellow. Mike turned his head
slowly and sized up that speaker.
"Well," said he, "I suppose the captain didn't spind his life lying on
his back in the parks!" He paused, and nodded his head, to let that
soak in, before he added: "So as to get his freezin' job up on the
bridge. Do ye begrudge him his pie, damn ye?"
"Pie! Oh pie!" cried one, and there began a great talk about
"hand-outs," and "sit-downs," and "throwing the feet,"--slang of
American trampdom.
"Well!" said Mike, hearing all that jargon. "I thought it was
cattlemen we was. We seem to be a bunch of hoboes, back-door
beggars----"
"Front-door!" shouted a sharp, pale-faced little youth. "I always go
to the front-door. If it's an old woman what opens I always asks her
if she would ask her mother to give something."
Mike glanced at him with the appearance of one who is sick. Michael,
cheered up afresh by Mike's recent friendly acknowledgment of his
presence, shouted to a man who had flung his empty plate at a rat that
ran on one of the pipes: "What are you doing that for? Let the rats
alone."
"What for?"
The general conversation subsided so that they might listen to this one.
"To keep them friendly. You may throw your arm out of your bunk in
your sleep, and if ye're always disturbing the rats they'll lay on to
your hand then. But if you pay no attention to them at any time
they'll understand it was an accident."
One or two laughed derisively, but they were quickly silenced by others
who wagged knowing heads. Michael, thus backed, proceeded to cite
cases.
"When I was on the steamship _A-Chiles_ the rats used to come up every
meal time and form up behind us clean round the table." There was a
laugh. "I'm tellin' ye!" said Michael. "There's no use of me going
further if ye don't believe the first of it."
"What else, then?" asked the Inquisitive One. But he was beneath
Michael's notice, for Michael wore a blind on his eye and was proud of
it by now.
"What was the rest?" said Mike.
"I was going to tell them," answered Michael, "but I suppose they won't
believe me, that the table was short for the number of rats, and they
formed up behind us----" he waved a hand behind him as if there were
rats there now--"four deep."
There was another laugh, but Mike did not join in. He was staring into
a corner, for something there had arrested his gaze. He turned to
those near him. He thought he had got used to the freaks on board, but
evidently not.
"Can any of youse tell me," he asked quietly, "what's the German
Emperor doing on board?"
They looked round. Over in the corner, with a heaped plate and two
biscuits, gorging, was a man whose attire would have ousted him from
any hotel in Regent Street or Broadway, but who was here a disgrace the
other way round--shamelessly well done; a fat, cunning-looking man with
lecherous eyes. It was probably his moustache that deluded Mike, for
it was a little bit reminiscent, perhaps, of that other celebrated one,
so handy for caricaturists.
"It's the night watchman--the night watchman," explained the
Inquisitive One, who perhaps had seen him before and instituted
inquiries.
"Bejabbers," said Mike, and putting down his empty cup and empty plate,
he led an adjournment on deck.
CHAPTER VIII
There was a tensity in the "Push" that night, a sense of expectancy and
foreboding, according to how they were constituted who felt it. There
were minor squabbles. The lower deck gang had several to settle, and
they never seemed to be settled. There was some slight friction in
Candlass's gang also over the fact that, thanks to the whim of their
straw-boss, they numbered three men less than the lower deck gang. Two
of these three that had been made a gift of to Cockney were present
when the subject was discussed, and the rising storm over that matter
made several wonder where the third was--the youth in the long coat.
"Where's Four Eyes?" someone asked.
"Oh, to hell!" said several, which being interpreted means that they
thought he was not worth worrying over.
Mike put his head on one side wondering, trying to remember if Four
Eyes had been present in the crowd wrangling for food, but he could not
remember, so he dismissed the subject. He was glad the fellow was out
of his sight anyhow, and not in his gang. And as for defending himself
in his action, which they now discussed, though he opened his mouth
once or twice to do so, he desisted on each occasion. "Let them
wrangle," his expression seemed to say. Charles, to give the
Inquisitive One his name, was agitated; he had set this discussion
agoing, and Mike's silence he began to feel as ominous. Mike was well
aware that he had started the "grouse" about being three men short, and
in an attempt to allay his forebodings, Charles now drew forth his
mouth organ, and began to play. Some of the younger fry danced. One
or two, who were mouth-organ experts, cocked their ears. They thought
they could play every whit as well as the Inquisitive One. His
rapid-fire eyes perceived this, and when he finished one tune, and
these young men made a grab for the instrument, he leapt back snarling.
There were shrieks of "Damn your eyes!" and "Half a mo'!" and "Give me
a chance!" and "To hell with you!"
"Give us a lend of it then!"
"Half a mo'!" shrieked Charles, and broke into another tune, holding
the mouth organ between the flattened palms of his hands, and putting a
tremolo into the music by the adroit movement of them. The other
would-be players drew back, sat down on their bunks. One of them, when
the dancers added shouts to their dancing, growled: "A little less
yelling like that. Let us hear the music."
"Who are you talking to?" said another, who had interspersed his dance
with many whoops. It was a mistake, for the man who had ordered
silence was that devilish, depravedly handsome, dandiacal person called
Jack. He rubbed his nose with the back of his hand and rose. There
was an expression at his mouth as of boredom. The youth who had
"lipped" him dived out of the cabin. Jack strolled after him. One or
two gave ear, listening for what sounds from outside might come through
the music within. They made up their minds that nothing had happened,
when suddenly there came throttling cries, and they listened anew,
listened briefly, and then said: "Oh, to hell!" Jack strolled back
again and looked at the two young men who had shown themselves as
especial friends of the man he had been chastising out there in his own
way. It was a brief but meaningful glance he gave to them; neither had
any response. The music went on, with a few interludes after that
fashion.
"Yes, very nice," said Mike eventually, gloomily. "Now we're going to
sleep. There's a few of youse fellows is going to have a happy day
to-morrow."
Some fell silent; others said: "Oh, we'll let them see!" It was
growing cold on deck, and one by one the men who had been above came
down into the stuffy cabin. The fellow who had "lipped" Jack crept in
and retired to his bunk. Mike, backed by Michael and others,
belligerently ordered the crew to strip. Several had already done so.
They were not too cold; the place was reekingly hot, and for all the
tendency of their oaths to be based upon naked matters, nakedness
brought forth no giggling comments. The stripped men reclined in all
manners of attitudes, carrying on conversations, rising on an elbow to
gesticulate, hanging a leg over a bunkside in excitement--but there was
none of that, no giggling at each other's nakedness. Now and then
Scholar was inclined to smile, but it was a wholly humorous smile; he
was thinking of what the people in the walk of life he came from would
think if they were present. He was picturing his father reclining on
the ottoman at home, rising up on an elbow as he discussed politics or
taxation with other friends similarly at ease. Several grimly refused
to strip.
"Oh, very well," said Mike. "Only I'm telling ye ye'll be lousy before
we reach Liverpool, wearing yer pants day and night."
Jack and Johnnie whispered together, and then went up on deck with the
air of young men going out on a "tear" for the evening. They were off
to see if they could amuse themselves by discovering the lairs among
the hay of one or two who had not come down to the cabin, to tickle the
ears of these men with blades of hay, or to pelt them with sheep dung,
or to interview their pockets, according to what seemed feasible. One
or two others slipped away anon, but did not go on deck, and presently
they returned tittering, vaulted into their bunks, and stretched out.
There was quiet for a little while, save for the lowing of the cattle
and the everlasting churn and beat of the propeller pulsing underfoot.
Then came Rafferty's voice from the distance asking somebody, in the
name of Saints and Devils, if he could not tie them up himself. The
answer was inaudible, even to those who were wide awake, but Rafferty's
voice came again:
"All of them? A lot of them! I'll come and see."
A titter again exploded from a bunk, a whispered "Shut up!" came from
another. In plunged Rafferty, wire rope in hand, and roaring: "Tumble
up, the lower deck"! Some of the men woke, thinking it was morning.
"Come on, you fellows!" Rafferty said, and they followed him. Mike
wakened.
"I just tell you fellows right now," he said, "you can confine your
letting loose of the steers in the darkness of the night to your own
deck, or there'll be some slaughtering done. Mind! Now when I say a
thing I mane it!"
The pacific men of the main deck thought to themselves: "Oh, Lord!
There'll be a free fight with all that lower deck crowd." The men who
had sleepily and subconsciously followed Rafferty came back presently;
two divisions of the steers, they reported, had been loosened and were
milling.
"Huh!" said Mike. "A nice night watchman that!" and rolled over.
Jack and Johnnie, after the others were asleep, stole back again,
muttering something about "divvy in the morning." The morning came
with awful celerity. "Tumble up, you sons of----!" and there was
Rafferty in the doorway, wire rope in hand, going from bunk to bunk
roaring, and coming down whack on the sleepers. One man sat up and
pointed at him before he drew near.
"Now look out, Rafferty!" he warned. "I'm not on your deck. If you
touch me I'll have it into you one way or another."
Rafferty glared at him, realised that the man was not on his deck, and
passed on. But all were awake now. Scholar, hauling on his clothes,
thought to himself: "Now we are going to have an exhibition of
discipline at sea!" Then suddenly, in a top bunk amidships, up sat one
of the pickpocket-faced youngsters, one of those referred to, in a
bunch, as "youse" by Mike. And he piped up: "Call me in another hour,
Rafferty, and fetch me me shavin' water."
Rafferty rushed at him, but the skimpy youth slipped to the deck on the
far side. The boss pursued, and amid cheers and whoops they ran, like
boys at tag, round and round the bunks. They grew winded. The
pickpocket-faced kid paused, made feints of coming this way that way,
and Rafferty, suddenly, abruptly, fled from the cabin.
"Better get out now, you," somebody said to the youngster, but he
delayed, uncertain; and as he delayed there, gaining his breath,
Rafferty returned with a pitchfork and charged upon him. A man in a
lower bunk thrust out his leg, and Rafferty cannoned over it, dropping
the pitchfork; but the wire rope was to hand. It fell from his pocket
where he had thrust it on arming himself with the sharper weapon, and
he grabbed it and scrambling up whirled back to the bunk of the man who
had tripped him, and down came the wire rope again and again.
"Eh?" came a sharp voice, exploding in the doorway, and there was
Candlass, white and very grim. "Main deck men, tumble up!" he ordered.
Behind him was a middle-sized, square man with a pepsin jaw, slightly
bent forward, left foot a little in advance of the right, clenched
fists almost touching over his midriff. Candlass became aware of him.
"That's all right," he said over his shoulder, in an easy tone, and the
pugilistic person, who bunked in Candlass's cabin, and who was on board
to bring over a dozen stallions penned amidships near the galley,
turned away. The main deck crowd filed out, Mike delaying to watch
them go, like a sergeant in command.
"You go ahead then," said Candlass to him. "I'll be after you
presently."
Rafferty had his man down still, out of the bunk, on the floor--not the
kid who had set the trouble going, but the man who had tripped the Mad
Boss up. They were fighting for possession of the wire rope, grappling
each other's throats, and it; but at last Rafferty gave up his hold
upon the rope. Candlass, motionless, kept an eye upon those who seemed
to be drawing on their boots with purpose. Several of the lower deck
men thought it safer to go forward than to wait and see the finish
here. They began to file out, past Candlass, who let them go, eyeing
each carefully, and then glancing back at the bout in progress on the
floor. Suddenly his hand shot out and he grabbed the throat of one
passing him, instinct telling him that this thin and evil-faced young
man was in too great haste. Rafferty rose then, commented: "That will
keep you thoughtful for a day or two!" and spun round looking for the
originator of this trouble.
"Where's that----" he began. "Oh, that's all right, Candlass; I want
to see him. Get out, the rest of ye."
"Don't go!" shrieked the youth.
"Get a move on, you fellows," said Candlass. "Shake a leg lively out
of that door."
Johnnie looked at Jack; Jack went white. He arranged his scarf.
"Don't go, you fellers!" screamed the youngster that Candlass had now
relaxed grip upon; he tried to plunge out of the door, but the boss of
the main deck had planted himself in the entrance, hands on hips, and
an elbow touched either side.
"What are you going to do with him?" said Jack, and there was a slight
thickness in his voice, and he canted back his head a little more than
usual. His shorter partner struck an attitude much like that adopted
by William a few minutes ago, he who had charge of the stallions, when
he thought Candlass might require assistance.
"Eh?" snapped Rafferty. He made a movement like one in a weird dance,
whirling on his heel, advancing to the door, and he sent the youth who
wanted his shaving water off his feet like a skittle well hit, sent him
flying the breadth of the cabin, rushed after him, and as he was
clutching a bunk stanchion to save a fall, flung his arms round him,
bear-hugged him, flung him again, as Jack and Johnnie ran forward, not
wholly certain what to do--flung him clear through the door, by the
side of which Candlass stood. There was a sound that indicated that
the insolent youth's head had hit something hard out there.
"Guess that will do," said Candlass.
Jack and Johnnie, and the dazed man who had tripped Rafferty up, and
one or two others who had not yet left, moved toward the door. Those
in the lead showed an impulse to pass the Mad Boss with a slight parody
of a seaman's roll that might have been taken for insolence. But
before they came to where Candlass stood they changed their gait, all
save Jack--but his gait was generally swaggering, and even he looked
strained as he went out. They passed through the door with a lowering
of their heads, somewhat as many people go into church. In the passage
outside the perky one, blubbering, rose and shuffled forward with them.
CHAPTER IX
Next morning Scholar was wakened by someone shaking his arm. It seemed
that he had fallen asleep, worn out, in the midst of a babel, a mere
second before the shake was given, and with a sense of distress he
opened his eyes. Candlass bent over him, and in a voice so kindly that
there came a lump in the throat of the new-awakened Scholar, he said:
"Tumble up, young fellow. Four o'clock."
"Thank you," said Scholar, and was aware of the note in his own voice,
a note as of gratitude.
Candlass, moving on, glanced back at him abruptly, and then went on
again looking in bunk after bunk, top bunk, lower bunk, and wherever he
saw, inert and blank, one of the men of the main deck squad he shook an
elbow of the sleeper. Hauling on his boots, sitting on the edge of his
bunk, Scholar looked after him, arrested. There could be no mistaking
the expression of Candlass's face; it was with pity that he looked into
these bunks. He shook gently, and there were grunts. He shook again,
and there came a sigh, or an "Oh, hell!" and the eyes opened, and then
Candlass, head bent, said: "Tumble up, Jack. Four o'clock!" or "Tumble
up, Liverpool!" or Sam, or Dublin, or whatever the name might be. They
woke in all sorts of ways. Some woke abruptly, and clenched a hand,
prepared for attack; some quailed back and put up a hand to parry;
some--great hulking fellows with the faces that we are accustomed to
call brutal--looked as if they felt as did Scholar. Candlass, his task
over, strolled quietly to the doorway, and his men did not keep him
waiting long; they filed out and followed him in the dark tween-decks,
where the lamps that hung here and there were beginning to swing, a
slight roll being on the ship as she surged out of river into estuary.
The everlasting hum and whirr of the shaft went on below. Now and
again one had to shorten a leg abruptly as she gave a roll. There was
a new freshness in the draughts of air that scurried between the decks,
and many little sounds suggested the open sea--little creakings and
chirpings of wood and steel; and outside, in the dark round her, there
rose faintly and fell away, a sound as of blown tissue paper. It was
black above through the hatches, not yet blue. No stars showed. The
atmosphere was fresh and full of little pin points of moisture. A bell
struck above, and a bell responded, beat for beat, forward, and from
beyond again a high piping voice was heard to declaim (it came with a
slightly blown sound): "All's well!" She was forging out to sea. Away
aft there was a whoop and shriek of: "Tumble up you sons of----!"
There followed yells, cat-calls, loud voices. That incorrigible weasel
was at it again. He sat up in his bunk, when the lower deck boss
arrived, and--"Call me in another hour, Rafferty," he said, "and bring
me me shaving water." He was less a cattleman than what is known in
the begging fraternity of the States as a "gunsel." Half-a-dozen of
his kidney together will set upon a grown man in a dark lane. Dislike
of hitting a kid too hard clings to the man even in the midst of the
tussle; but the kids have no qualms. They hang on like rats. It is
almost impossible to tell their age. They may be anything from the mid
teens to twenty-five, and they remain for many years looking simply
neither boy nor man--peek-faced, cunning, slippery.
Rafferty slightly changed his tactics this morning. He stood and
looked at the youth. He wagged his head at him.
"My lad," he said, "what I'll do with you is to take you into my berth,
over my knee."
"No, you won't!" shouted the youth, and one or two others of the same
breed added their voices to his, making a chorus.
"Tumble up, tumble up, damn ye; it's four o'clock!" said Rafferty, and
then to the gunsels in general: "If you was a full-sized man and gave
me that lip I would paste your face!" and he glared round at the
full-sized men.
"Come on, come on!" said Cockney.
"Yah!" jeered the first gunsel.
Cockney gave that horrible jump that made his wide pants flap round his
thin shanks. He had always to take people by surprise, so as to have
any chance at all. Now he bowled the boy over with a flat blow on the
cheek; and, not long since a gunsel himself, and very little patient
with them, he leapt at the other two who were standing together waiting
to see the fun, and crashed their foreheads together. There seemed
less sympathy with them this morning. Harry, the crazy fellow, sat up
with tousled hair and gibbered profanity at Rafferty, but Rafferty was
nearly as crazy as he.
"Well, you're a grown man!" said he. "Take that!" and with a mighty
quick action he flung his hand outside the cabin door, grabbed thence a
pitchfork that he had left there on entering, and thrust at Harry with
it. Harry put up his hand to protect himself, and the prong jabbed.
He rolled over to get out of his bunk upon the other side, being in one
of those amidships. The prong jabbed again--with a certain care this
time, so that it was possibly not much worse than a pin-prick. He
jumped in the way that some pedestrians jump from mad motorists,
catching himself behind, and the men gave little laughing grunts.
"Come on, come on!" several growled, and the lower deck squad filed
out, Cockney pushing his face close to the faces, one after the other,
of the three weasely ones, who might be anything from sixteen to
twenty-five. They seemed to understand that, and went quietly forward.
CHAPTER X
Mike had long since sobered, and was now getting better of the
dry-mouth and dry-tongue feeling that had followed his drunkenness. He
leant with folded arms upon the poop rail and observed how, in the
estuary, where the shores rapidly receded one from the other, the
lightships were all booming. A ball of steam rose from each, and anon
came the shriek. There was something unreal about the whole view.
Kind sunlight was upon the deck of the _Glory_. The precipitous bank,
the higher south bank, could be seen clearly, rolling up shining,
dew-wet, a glistening green; and yet the sirens kept calling. Suddenly
there showed up, some distance off, two pieces of stick, erect, a short
and a long one, and then a low mist rolled aside, and the two pieces of
stick were disclosed as the mast tops of a schooner. Mike looked at
the last lightship, and noticed how only its top was visible. The mist
lay low, and in banks. Not for great steamers, like the _Glory_,
standing high, did the sirens roar, but for the little sailing vessels
and coasters under the haze. And now, day advancing, that haze began
to disappear. Looking over the side he saw the green water quite
clear, and something was swimming in it. Elbows on the taffrail, he
glanced over his shoulder to see if there was anybody near him who
would be interested, but there were only some of the "youse" about, who
might reply, if he pointed out to them this otter, that so pleased him:
"Well, what about it?"
The "youse" behind him broke out suddenly with: "Got any tobacco,
Frenchy?"
"Feenish!" came Frenchy's voice, and Pierre strolled past. He too
looked over the side, and Mike glanced at him.
"Otter, Pierre," he said. "You savvy otter?"
"Ah yes, so! What you call? Otter?"
"Yes, what they call an otter. Very good swim?"
"Yes, swim all right," and Pierre pensively watched the otter swimming
away sternwards.
"How you getting on down at the galley?" asked Mike, for Pierre had
been told off to sit at the galley door peeling potatoes, washing up,
and so forth, on behalf of the upper deck. Pierre shrugged his
shoulders.
"Not ver' good," he said.
"Who's helping you for the lower deck? Somebody helping you for the
lower deck?" asked Mike.
"Two!" replied Pierre, and held up two fingers.
"Two!" said Mike, frowning, as though something was wrong.
"Not together. One man was come down with me--you know, man with
hat----" and he held his hands up some distance out from his head on
either side. Mike nodded. "He came down with me first day. Candlass
tell me go down. Rafferty tell him. The cook talk rough. He say
nozing--he just look. The cook say: 'What the hell you look at me?'
and he say to cook--something I don't know. The cook run and get----"
Pierre made a motion as of one who chops beef with a cleaver.
"A mate cl'aver!" said Mike, to the manner born.
"I don't know what you call. For chop--for cut meat."
"Yes, that's right. And what was the feller with the hat after doing?"
The interesting conversation had a pause of puzzlement.
"I beg your pardon," said Pierre.
Mike, too, was worried for a moment, in his anxiety to hear the tale.
"Yes, yes. What?" he said.
"Ze cook run out at zees man, but he did not jump. He stand and look.
Ze cook drop his hand and put the knife with handle down."
"The cl'aver," said Mike.
"What you say? Oh, yes, clever--ver' clever, not afraid. There is
nozing more for a little while, then the cook come to the door and he
say: 'I have white vife in Liverpool,' and this man----" and again the
gesture on either side of the head--"say: 'Come outside.'"
"He is a nigger, is he--a black fellow?"
"Black, yes. He say: 'What you mean?' This fellow only say once more:
'Come outside.' The cook stand inside door and say: 'Yah! You
someting cattleman!' and zees man heet him."
"Eh?"
"Heet."
"Oh yes, quite."
Pierre showed where, jabbing his own fist under his chin.
"He go down bang! And he get up and reach for----" and again he
indicated the cleaver. "But zees man with big hat have valise like me.
He give it to the baker to keep for him for a shilling----"
"A valise!" said Mike. "Go on."
"He jump inside baker's cabin, and he say: 'Partner, you give me my
valise dam' quick!' He grab it from inside and bring out one revolver.
Ze cook run past me and say: 'Where he go?' I say nozing--I am too
excite. And zees man----" again he showed the breadth of hat--"there
he is, throw down valise, and he say to the cook: 'You drop that,' he
say. 'You get in galley.' And he follow the cook, and baker follow
him. Ze baker do not like ze cook. All day ze cook shout at him:
'Baker, damn you, ze oven is hot. Baker, damn you, what about your
bread? Baker, damn you, I'll put dis dough overboard if you do not
come!' And zees man say to cook: 'You dance,' he say. 'You dance, you
God-damn nigger! You tell your white vife you menshion about just now,
you tell her I make you dance when you go home,' and ze baker
laugh--and zen jump back where ze cook not see him laugh, for he is a
small man with a cough, and ze cook is very large and ugly."
"And did he dance?" asked Mike.
"He try to dance!" Pierre shook his head. "No, not good. He kneel
down, and ze man go away. By and by he look out and he say to me--he
shake his fist at me--he say: 'By God, I report that man to Captain!'
he say. 'You understand?' I say: 'Yes.' He shake his two fist at me
and say again: 'By God, I report that man to Captain!' I say: 'Yes!'"
"You stay down?" asked Mike.
Pierre shrugged his shoulders.
"Oh, not nice." He waved a hand in one direction. "But up here," he
waved a hand in the other direction, "not nice." It was Scylla and
Charybdis for Pierre all right.
"Ye're doing all the paylings yerself then now?" asked Mike.
"I beg your par_don_?"
"All alone down there now--you?"
"No. Anozer man come down. Ze cook say to Meestair Rafferty, when he
come past: 'I want anozer man. I give zat ozer man ze sack. He no
good.'----"
"The hell he did!"
"Yes, he do. And Rafferty bring down anozer man."
"Has he got a gun too, do you think?" asked Mike.
"What you say? No, no. Coat and spectacles."
"Do ye mane to tell me," said Mike, disgusted, "that ye would sit on
the one side of a galley door payling spuds, and that sitting forninst
ye on the other?"
This was beyond Pierre, but a sudden stampede behind announced that
grub was being brought aft.
"So long just now," said Mike, and plunged down after the crowd; and
Pierre, who in a menial capacity had helped to prepare this meal, went
down again to the galley door from his airing, to take what food the
cook would have ready for him. He gathered that Mike had some contempt
for his occupation down there, but in so far as the society went, it
was--as he had phrased it--not nice there, not nice here. But the
quality, as well as the quantity, of the food doled out to him in
return for his services at the galley door, was greatly different from
that which was scrimmaged for in the cattlemen's cabin, gristly hash
and a biscuit, and a tin-cupful of soup. Pierre, down there forward,
ate as well as the captain--had mashed potatoes, a little piece of
fish, well cooked Irish stew, a hunk of pie; and, if they had paid no
heed to the fierce expletives volleyed upon them, the two galley slaves
received a cup of coffee later, with: "Here--here's a cup of coffee for
you, you poor devils." Pierre and Four Eyes are not the only people
who have chosen the fleshpots of Egypt on such terms.
CHAPTER XI
An air of belligerence still hung about the boat, thick as the smell of
the cattle. The twelve stallions, ranged amidships, bickered like the
men. The alleyway before them was narrow; they could stretch their
necks all the way across it, and they were everlastingly doing so--not
in the friendly way of the long-horned steers that stretched out merely
to draw attention to themselves lest somebody might have food for them,
but stretched out crankily, even at their mildest, and at their worst,
devilishly. When one did so thrust out its head the ears were always
laid back, the teeth showing, the eyes rolled white, glinting round to
see what the neighbour was up to. Out would come that neighbour's head
like a darting snake, and snap would go the teeth left and right. Out
came the next head, and so on along the line--till every horse was
snapping left and right save the end ones, that had only to keep alert
inwards. Thus were they with each other, and when human beings came
along each tried to take a piece out of the passer by; and when he
succeeded in running the gauntlet, tried to take a piece out of its
neighbour for having wished to share the human being's head.
Most of the men attempted the "Whoa now! Steady boy!" method, not only
for their own sakes, but for those who were to handle the horses later.
The night watchman used to go past them on hands and knees. Scholar
saw him do so once, and immediately gave up his practice of going on to
the upper deck, and passing over them so, and descending again; gave up
even descending to the lower deck and running the gauntlet of the men
there (which was not quite as bad as that of the stallions, for not all
were unfriendly) when coming and going. Now, when he had occasion to
go forward alone, he always did so by way of the horses, the direct
way, and passed them slowly. Each one of them seemed to be possessed
of a devil. Cockney had an ear torn off--and the temper of the
stallions was not improved thereby. That fellow was a marvel. He got
the bandage off the dent of the taffrail on the third day, and that
afternoon he had his head bound up afresh because of his torn ear. He
expressed no opinion about these stallions, he voiced no threat, not
even to the steward who bandaged him, fresh from the accident; but
after the steward had done with him, and he had brought the odour of
iodoform into our midst and been decently sympathised with, he stole
away armed with a cudgel. Those who saw him slip it up under his
jacket said nothing. He swung with flapping trousers, a vigorous bag
of bones, along the alley where the stallions challenged all comers.
Out came the head of stallion one at his approach, and crash went the
cudgel on its nose. That brought out the head and neck of the second,
brought out the craning necks of all of them; and Cockney flailed his
way along the line, flailed up and down, and flailed his way back
again, and returned to the cattlemen's den and sat down upon the bunk's
edge, with the spreading stain of a fresh hemorrhage upon the bandage.
Men looked at the head between those thin hands.
[Illustration: Flailed his way along the line.]
"Your ear's a-bleedin' again," said one.
"Never mind me hear," he answered. "I give them socks."
But another man eventually advised him to go back to the steward and
have his ear re-dressed. The stallions were not improved by this
treatment. It was impossible now to "stay with" any one of them,
hanging on to its upper lip and stroking the forehead, whether it would
or not, and crooning: "Whoa there! Steady boy!" They raised their
heads high, and launched downwards. Later on, Cockney, back again from
the doctoring, put his hand to his head and said: "I tell you this
'urts, it does!" suddenly rose and went out again; and once more some
men guessed what manner of errand he went upon, but said nothing.
William saw him at his flailing this time.
"What are you doing?" he said, charging upon him. "I'd give you the
same if you hadn't got enough already."
"Wot for?" asked Cockney, and as he thrust forward his face his eyes
danced and blazed feverishly, like the eyes of one at bay, under the
white bandage.
"For hitting them," replied William.
"Bit off my hear, didn't they?" said Cockney.
"You leave them alone," William advised.
"You keep 'em from bitin' off people's 'eads, then. They're your
stallions, ain't they?"
"You leave them alone."
Cockney fired one word at William, his eyes as if a lamp was reflected
in them. William wrestled inwardly, clenched his hands at his side,
and Cockney moved on. William turned back from him, letting the matter
rest there in consideration of Cockney's state; but he did not look
where he was going, still had a lingering inclination to punch Cockney
anyhow, and had his head turned so that Cockney could see that thought
in his eye. The end stallion flung its head up and down, with a
sidewise swing, loose necked, and William got the blow full on the side
of his face and head, and went down.
"Yah!" jeered Cockney, as William dragged himself up on one palm,
clapping the flat of his other hand to his temple, and he returned by
way of the upper deck (for he was at the far end of the stallion row)
with a dancing step, to narrate to those in the cattlemen's quarters
what had befallen. And they were quietly satisfied, for William was no
favourite. They all remembered how he had come to their door one
morning, and stood behind Candlass in the attitude of a prize-fighter
being photographed for the posters.
The steers were not like that. Many of the men had pets among them.
There was a big fellow on the main deck that won almost all the men
over, all those that could be won over by anything. He began his
engaging ways about the third day, and kept them up thereafter. As
soon as he saw anything on two legs advancing he thrust his head across
the alley, holding it a little tilted like a cat that asks to have its
neck scratched. After the feeding and watering was over knots would
linger there, beside that wise long-horn. The hand was not enough; he
preferred the edge of a piece of board rubbed up and down. Seeing how
he enjoyed a scratch, various men offered themselves as scratchers to
other beasts. You could see the men all along the alley, each with a
piece of board, arms going up and down automaton-like, the steers with
their heads slowly turning, gratified. And as the men like clock-work
figures scratched the beasts' necks, they carried on shouting
discussions each to each. But this big fellow who inaugurated the
scratching was especially charming. When one side was scratched
sufficiently for the time being, he would raise his head up and over,
carefully, so that his long horns might not smite his human friend, and
then present the other side of the neck for treatment. If the movement
was not observed he would turn his head slowly to the side,
pushing--none of your swinging blows from him, no suggestion ever of
drawing back his head and launching it forward with sharp horn
projecting.
The bulls, too, that had been unruly the first day, were now all
friendly. If a man happened to lean against their pen, he would be
reminded of where he was, not by a prod of a horn, but by a ringed nose
nuzzling into the hands held behind.
After the glorious scent of balsam, blown out to us from the south
shore, became so thin it was scarcely perceptible amid the smell of
beasts, the whoop of the siren, thrilling the decks, on and on, was
added to the lowing of the steers and the bleating of sheep. The
_Glory_ slowed down slightly and glided into the Newfoundland fog.
CHAPTER XII
Fog reeked and rolled round the ship, and there was a swell on the sea.
Under the fog it moved, with knolls and valleys, high and low, regular
and apparently everlasting as those rolls and dips of green grazing
land from Rocky Mountain House down to the Little Missouri--that
country "beyant," whence came the cattle. Ever and again one could see
across and along, under the fog, as a man on hands and knees might,
lifting a carpet's edge, look along the floor. But even that was a
doubtful kind of vision, with shifting and obliterating coils of
vapour, so that even if the fog lifted for a yard or two it seemed as
if the sea steamed below the lifted fog. The sea's surface seemed
covered by a film, and the swell moved under it, a film that the
_Glory_ broke as she loomed along, sliding her nose up and down, many
feet to the rise, many feet to the drop, advancing all the while. It
was before the day of wireless. No messages were coming and going;
only her siren complained into the wilderness of fog and water.
Forward, the first officer and a couple of seamen took soundings. The
ship stopped in a great stillness. Sheep sneezed and coughed; the
cattle lowed. Deep down there was a sound of shovelling of coal; then
a bell cling-clanged, and once again there broke out a sound as of a
"hush," and the whirl and whirl of the shaft with its old refrain.
Feeding and watering being over for the afternoon, the cattlemen
clustered in their hot den, that little bit of an iron safe of a place,
going up in the air, swinging left and right, full of such sounds as a
cane chair makes. Michael, squat and broad, patch on his eye, was
telling some experience of his life to somebody; another man drew near
to listen and remained; still more clustered round. Twosomes, talking
in corners, desisted to listen also.
"Michael!" one of them called. "Wasn't there something about you and
stowing away?"
"Oh, that's an old story," answered Michael.
"What's that about?" asked several of the younger men, who wanted to
gather as much data as possible on this subject. "Tell us about it,
Michael," they besought him.
"Well," said Michael, "it was when I came over on the _A-Chiles_."
"Was Johnson boss then?"
"Oh, before Johnson's time. I've been over with Johnson, too," said
Michael.
"Shut up!" several admonished. "Let him tell the story."
"I was on the rocks," said Michael. "You see I got down to the docks
too late to get the _A-Chiles_ back."
There was a movement of interest, a drawing closer. This was a
predicament they understood. There are always cattle to bring eastward
from Canadian and U.S. ports to Liverpool or London, and the cattleman
may return with his boss on the same ship; but if he loses it there are
not cattle-boats plying west across the Atlantic to give him a job
again. There is stoking to be done, of course, east and west, but
there is some kind of stokers' union; and the cattleman does not know
whether he would be welcomed among the stokers. There are always ways
of getting across, but the cattleman, or at any rate the young
cattleman, needs to be posted up on them.
"Where did you stow away?" asked one of the wizened partners of that
youth who morning by morning demanded his shaving water from Rafferty.
Michael had already begun his story, and this question, and others
discharged from the rear of those clustered near him, slightly offended
him.
"As I was saying," said he, "I goes on board, and some of the fellows
had left one of the boats afore fixing the tarpaulin down. I gets
inside there, and I hears somebody say: 'I see you! I'll get the
police to you!'"
The Inquisitive One unconsciously ducked his head into his shoulders,
and the edges of his eyes narrowed. The word "police" always affected
him like that. Jack took on the expression of someone who does what is
called "looking the other way." He became blank.
"But I thought I knew the voice," continued Michael. "I says: 'Is that
you, Jim Larson?'"
"It was a friend, was it?" a tense listener exploded.
Michael looked with his one eye at the interrupter.
"So he fastens up the tarpaulin," said he, "and there I stays till we
drops Ireland, and I tell ye I was wantin' something to eat. So I puts
my hand over the gunwale, and loosens them ropes, and----"
One of the men at this came a little closer, cunning and critical.
"--I comes on deck, and oh there was a----"
Michael's vocabulary broke down at this, and with a lot of by-thises
and by-thats, he gave it to be understood that a bo'sun and a third
officer told him that they would clap him in irons, that the skipper
ordered him to be swung over the side in a cradle and start in
chipping, and that he said he wouldn't go. At this point Michael
looked up at the insidious critic.
"Oh, well, indeed," he hurriedly went on, "I did a bit of painting for
them, and my friend on board gives me a chance to slip the coppers at
Montreal."
"Yes," said somebody, "but wasn't there something about you having a
fight with the bo'sun when he took you forward?"
"There was indeed, there was some kind of scrimmage." Michael looked
up with his one eye at the man whose expression in listening was
different from that of all the other listeners. "You been over with me
before, haven't ye?" he asked him.
"Tell us about the scrap you had with the bo'sun going forward!"
shouted another.
"No, indeed," Michael declared. "I'll drop that bit out. I've told
the story so often that I don't know myself now which is the right way
of it and which is the wrong way."
There was a laugh at this, and Michael smiled.
"Oh, indeed, there was a fight all right," he assured them. "But I've
told about it different ways. I sometimes wonder myself now if I came
off best."
There were sympathetic murmurs.
"Indade, of course, of course," Mike spoke, lying stretched upon his
top bunk, near the door, head on hand, lenient and understanding. "You
got over anyhow, and you didn't get put in the clink, and there's much
to be thankful for."
"Oh, we're only cattlemen," said a voice.
"Lend us your mouth organ!" cried a youth.
The Inquisitive One looked for a moment as if he would protect his
breast pocket; but fighting was getting stale, and so he handed over
the instrument, the man who took it wiping it on a dirty sleeve before
he plunged into the strains of "Rule Britannia!" As he played there
was a movement among those near the door. Candlass was there, but he
lingered outside until the air was finished and then--"Feed and water,
boys," he said, looking in, and as his men defiled into the passage
Rafferty arrived.
"Come on wid youse, lower deck!" he bawled. His men filed out fairly
orderly. It was only at the morning call that they were still inclined
to be cross-grained.
Affairs were settling down into the routine of the trip. There was,
indeed, a spirit of friendliness growing among the "Push." Free of
liquor, and of the after effects of liquor, the largeness of heart of
many was evident, though perhaps there was something morbid, as well as
of kindly interest, in their sympathy that they lavished on little
Michael. He had his head turned over it, spent most of his spare time
sitting on the edge of his bunk, holding up his head to let them look
at his eye under the shade. Cockney and he, if they had not yet made
friends exactly, had allowed the matter of their fight on the poop to
be as an ancient matter now forgotten. The bad eye might have been the
result of an accident for all that was said about Cockney by those who
looked at it; indeed Cockney was the only one who seemed to recall the
origin of it. He sat apart, looking a little ashamed during these
examinations of the injured member; but his shame soon began to give
way to jealousy, for had he not a bandage on his head--had he not an
interesting ear that might be pried at? Yet, take it by and large, as
seamen say, a feeling of amicability came to the ship--that is to say
by comparison with the spirit that had inhabited it so far. Had any
quietist been spirited aboard upon an Arabian carpet he might well have
been excused for stepping hastily on to it again, and most hastily
murmuring the incantations that would speed his departure; but for
those who had seen the "Push" with the drink in it, or the drink waning
in it, the _S.S. Glory_ was now almost on the way to being sacred!
The night-watchman, who slept away most of the day in Rafferty's cabin,
was the most objectionable sight on deck. He always appeared at meal
times, scooped up more than his share, then strolled about for a little
while for a constitutional, but was never spoken to. As the days wore
on, however, he spoke to others in a manner horribly blending
intimidation and fawning, his great moustache waving. He would plant
himself in front of some member of the "Push" and explain that he had
come down in the world, that he had a son in the Household Cavalry, six
foot three, with a fist that would fell an ox. "If my son was on
board," he would say, and glare, and if the glare was returned: "Oh,
not that I mean anything," he would add. The cattlemen gossiped
infinitely less than do people aboard a passenger ship, but it was
inevitable that the watchman should be observed, and to some extent
discussed.
"What was he saying to you?" asked Jack of a young man before whom the
night-watchman had been peering and glaring and fawning.
"Oh, I don't know--about a son in the army, six foot three, knock the
stuffing out of anybody. Says he's been divorced."
Mike, hanging over the rail, turned around.
"He's a lazy good-for-nothing, that night-watchman," he said. "It's a
wonder to me youse fellows on the lower deck don't fix him. These last
nights now we haven't had a dacent sleep for him waking Rafferty." He
laughed. "I hear Rafferty says to him: 'Don't you waken me,' he says,
'if there are only one or two loose. Waken me if there's more than
half-a-dozen.'" Mike paused, and then added: "But there always is
half-a-dozen."
Some of the lower deck men within hearing grinned.
"Oh, I know what it is," said Mike. "Some of youse slips out at night
and loosens them, so as to get back on Rafferty for treating you the
way he does. It's cutting off your nose to spite your face, bringing
Rafferty in at twilve, at wan, at two, and at three, roaring like hill
for you to tumble up, and wakenin' us all. What was he after saying
now, shoving his face at you, me lad, and waving his tusks at you in
the wind? Was it about his tall son that has the strong arm?"
"He says he was divorced," said the young man.
"Divorced, is it?" answered Mike. "He must have been married then, so
there wouldn't be any truth in what I would be calling his lad to him
if he comes along to me talking about him and his strong arm, and
hinting what he would be after doing, and him thousands of miles away."
His voice growled on. "Did he tell ye what he was divorced for?"
"No."
Mike's voice almost suggested that he knew himself.
"Indade, he was divorced for laziness," he said.
Jack swaggered away smiling, and the night-watchman, arriving then on
the poop, came up to him, seeing he was alone.
"Are these men talking about me?" he said.
He was evidently a poor judge of character. Jack strolled slowly past
and over his shoulder--"Ask them," he said.
The night watchman glared and bellowed, in the roaring voice of a
bar-room bully: "I'm only asking you a simple question."
Jack stopped in his stride, looked again over his shoulder, and smiled
queerly. The night-watchman thought it was a pacific smile, and
stepped closer.
"I won't have it!" he roared, and thrust his tusked face forward
presumably to let Jack see the determination in it.
Jack merely canted himself backwards, hands in pockets, and--"Take your
face off me," he said quietly, "or I'll spit in your eye."
The night-watchman was shocked.
"That's a nice thing for a lad to say to an elderly man," he commented.
"Oh, shut up!" said Jack quietly.
"If my son was here----"
"If your son was here," said Jack mockingly. "I know all about
him--he's six foot three, isn't he?--I'd pound the stuffing out of him.
One of the family is enough to be going on with. If you come chumming
round the decks after me any more, I'll come along and stick you in the
ribs to-night, when you're down there supposed to be watching. I will.
I don't want you to come talking to me. You'll waken up with a knife
in you. Now, that'll do!" and he strolled on, leaving the
night-watchman with a face of terror, but drawing himself erect, and
twisting his moustache.
Jack walked the length of the deck and turned, but stepping a foot to
one side so that he walked back, in his slow march, direct upon the
night-watchman. As he walked he took his right hand from his pocket,
clenched, and walked swinging it. "Get out of the way!" he said.
"Shift!" The watchman moved on one side. Jack walked on, wheeled,
marked where the night-watchman stood now, and, both hands in pockets
again, he trod the deck back like a panther, straight toward him.
"You're doing this on purpose!" boomed the night-watchman, squaring
himself again.
Jack raised his handsome and evil face.
"You come around talking to me," he said, "you say any more to me and
I'll fix you all right." The night-watchman stepped aside, and when
Jack turned at the end of that walk the watchman was scuttling down the
companion way like a rabbit into a burrow.
Nobody congratulated Jack in words. He was a dark horse. He was one
of themselves, but except with Johnnie he was not a clubable young man.
Men like Cockney, men like Mike, never spoke to him, nor he to them.
Sometimes, in the morning, after the watering was over, if he met
Scholar's eye, he would give his head a little jerk to left and say:
"Hallo!" He was of those who, when others talked, could move away and
not come back again, and yet be called to account by no one for such
contempt. He was of those who, if spoken to, could lean up against the
rail, cross-legged, turn and look gently up and down the frame of the
questioner, then move away, dumb. Perhaps it was Jack, and his partner
Johnnie with his feverish devilry, who were at the bottom of an opinion
that began to be current on the lower deck. The lower deck men, it
appeared, thought that the main deck men were somewhat lacking in
spirit. They managed to pass on their devilish restlessness to one or
two on the deck in question, and these, thus affected, had the air of
looking for trouble. A handy theme offered, and they fell to grumbling
over the fact that they were three men short.
"_Men_ short, did you say?" inquired Mike.
"_Things_ short. Do you call them three things _men_?"
The complaining voices subsided, but there were glances cast at Mike by
one or two that were intended to be read as: "Who do you think you are?"
"I've had enough short-handed," broke out one of the less easily
extinguished.
But here the routine interfered. A hail came from forward, and the men
on the poop, and the men in the cabin below, had to file away to the
afternoon feeding. When the main deck bunch spread out with hay and
buckets, Candlass appeared, coming down the narrow alley to see that
the men did not overdo the belabouring of those steers near the end
where the hay was, great beasts whose main thought was to make a meal
off the armfuls of hay that went past them while the steers at the far
end looked down the alley and lowed vehemently; to see, also, that the
mood of laziness in the men did not triumph over the mood of
determination and prevent the steers at the far end from having a fair
feed; to see also that all hands had tumbled out. So far he had had no
skulkers in his crowd, but he was an experienced cattle boss. He moved
along slowly, edging sideways past each hay-laden man. All were busy;
he had merely to look on. Then he spoke.
"Isn't there a man short?" he asked.
Nobody answered.
"Tom," he addressed one, "do you know where that fellow with the mouth
organ is?"
"Isn't he here, boss?" and the man that Candlass had spoken to looked
along the decks as if he expected to see the Inquisitive One somewhere
at work. Candlass went slowly up the alleyway. Scholar did not
observe his approach until the boss's hand was on his shoulder, and he
pushed his armful of hay aside to let Candlass go past, a steer on the
side toward which he moved immediately tearing at the bundle.
"There's a man short, isn't there, Scholar?" asked Candlass.
"Don't know," answered Scholar, and was aware that Candlass peered
sharply at him before hailing Mike.
"What's the matter with that man, Mike, the man that has the mouth
organ?"
There was distress on Mike's forehead as he answered: "I don't know."
"You _should_ know," said Candlass. "You're the straw boss."
"Yes, yes, I'm the straw boss maybe, but I'd rather work meself
than----" and he said no more. Only Scholar, near Candlass, caught the
response of: "Oh yes, quite so."
Then the boss went aft; and all the men along the alley, for some
reason, turned and looked at his back. Even after he had disappeared
they continued to pass the hay without a word, then they looked along
the alley again, and coming forward was the Inquisitive One. The
mouths of several of the men opened, an upright furrow showed between
their brows. What they saw seemed inconceivable, for the Inquisitive
One appeared to have shrunk, was deathly white, did not look the same
man. Behind him Candlass walked, shoulders a little bent, as one under
a burden, lips puckered, and eyes on the deck; and the Inquisitive One
fell to work, making a whimpering sound ever and again. He was
changed, as a cat that has been dipped in a tub of water, but he never
told any of the men what Candlass had done to him. Some asked, who had
his gift, or failing, of inquisitiveness; others left it to him to tell
if he cared to; but none heard. Probably it was a bear-hug that the
Inquisitive One had received, alone in the cattlemen's cabin where he
sulked over Mike's contempt for those who objected to working with
three men short--for Candlass had arms like steel.
CHAPTER XIII
The crew sober was very different indeed from the crew drunk. Their
likes and their dislikes were more explicable now. There were one or
two who spoke to nobody and were left alone, such as the Man with the
Hat. He had made a nest of hay for himself on the upper deck; nobody
knew, nobody cared, what he did when it rained; nobody was curious
enough to go along to see how he weathered it when they passed through
lashing rain. He had one manner for all men--one attitude--the
attitude of a bulkhead. A friendly approach was met by him exactly in
the same fashion as an inquisitive approach. As for openly
antagonistic approach--none made it. He did not seem to want to know
anything about the cattlemen. Even when at work with his half of the
gang he was never known to say a word, except once when a man pushed
him, and he whirled round upon him and said, low and vindictive, the
one word "Quit!" And the man quit. The night-watchman halted beside
him once and said "Good evening," but received no reply. He did not
take the snub, stood beside the nest of the Man with the Hat, looking
up at the voluminous and oily-looking smoke that rushed away from the
top of the smoke stack and stretched out like a fallen pillar,
diminishing across the sea.
"Well," said the night-watchman, still looking overhead, "it looks as
if we might have a dirty night."
Still there was no reply, and the night-watchman, thrusting his hands
deep in his coat pockets, fumbling for pipe and matches, looked round
at the Man with the Hat, and peered at him from under his
cream-coloured eyebrows--then moved on with a little more haste than he
usually exhibited, recovered a few paces away, and made pretence that
he had only moved off to light his pipe in the lee of one of the
sheep-pens. He bent down there in the attitude of a boy at leapfrog,
and as he lit his pipe, expending many matches, could only think to
himself: "That is a dangerous young man."
Scholar, who had no distaste for the appearance of the Man with the
Hat, marching to and fro on the swinging deck later on, enjoying the
pillar of smoke rolling out in the deepening purple night, enjoying the
wind, enjoying the sweep of the masts that gave the stars, as they came
out, an appearance as of rushing up and down the sky, commented, in
passing the Man with the Hat: "Bit of wind." No reply! He thought
that the wind carried his words away.
"Bit of wind, I say," he repeated. No reply. He thought the man must
be deaf, so passed on and took his stand near the stern that tossed
high and slid down, every slide being a forward slide, the screws
whirling. He was enjoying the motion and the spindrift on his
shoulders--for he was only in undervest and trousers--when up came two
men of the lower deck squad, and one said to him: "Rough night." He
did not feel inclined to talk with them, but, a little sore from what
might have been a snub forward (for the Man with the Hat might not be
deaf), he put a certain warmth into his nod and smile in response. The
two came closer at that. He wondered why it was that so many of these
men could not chat without having the appearance of being ready at any
moment to lift a hand and smite their interlocutor. They came close
and plied him with questions--one a Welshman, the other from the
Kingdom of Fife. Somewhat thus went the conversation:
"Whit deck are you on?"
"The main deck."
"I wondered. I never seen you on the lower deck. Where have you been?"
"What do you mean?" asked Scholar.
"Have you been in Canada?"
"Yes--part of it."
"What part?" asked the Welshman.
"Oh, I came up through Lower Ontario."
"Then you wasn't stopping there?" this from the Fifer, with a
villainous scowl, as if Scholar had been trying to deceive. "You was
in the States?"
Instead of giving them County and State as reply, he answered now with
the bald: "Yes."
"What states?" asked the Welshman.
"Michigan."
"Whit was ye daeing in Michigan?" asked the Fifeman.
There came into Scholar's mind a brief conversation he had overheard
earlier in the day. One man had told a story of something he had seen
"when I was in Florida."--"What were you doing in Florida?" the
Inquisitive One had asked after the story was told.--"Eh?" had said the
man who had been in Florida, with a note of warning.--"I asked you what
you were doing in Florida?" the Inquisitive One had returned, with a
showing of the teeth.--"Ask my elbow!" had been all the answer to that,
spoken as if each word was a knife-thrust. Scholar felt himself out of
his sphere. He had no practice in saying: "Ask my elbow!" in that
tone, or in any tone; and it seemed to him the requisite reply now. As
he paused, wondering how to fob off these two catechists, the Fifer
said, with a curl of his lip: "You're getting it now, then."
"Getting what? I don't understand you."
"Oh, you understand all right."
Scholar's eyelids came slightly together. He wished he knew how to act
in this society, found himself squaring his chest a little, found that
his jaw was tightening. At this juncture Mike appeared on deck,
hitched his belt, came rolling along towards them, drew up alongside
and yawned loudly, stretching himself, raising his elbows in the air,
and clasping his hands behind his head. Then, leaning forward between
the two catechists, he spat out into the flying scud, turned his big
back on them, hitched his belt again, and said to Scholar: "Bejabbers,
it's cold! Let's have a quarter-deck walk, Scholar."
Scholar fell in step with him. At the end of their walk, when they
turned, he was aware, without looking too keenly, that the two men of
inquisitorial mind were feeling highly vindictive; but the end of their
return walk bringing them again close to these two, Mike took a brief
farther step to the taffrail, swinging back largely.
"What was them two saying to you?" he asked, as they walked forward
once more.
"Oh, just asking questions about where I had been, and all that sort of
thing."
Mike gave a "Huh!" of disgust. They wheeled, and began the return
balancing walk to the poop just in time to see "them two" going down
the companion-way. Mike brought up against the taffrail at the end of
their march this time, and leaning back on it, said he: "I tell you
what it is, Scholar. Them fellers think they're better than us
cattlemen. They're tradesmen. I've seen enough--I don't need to
listen to all they're saying, after what you tell me. They're
tradesmen; indade, I expect they're ruddy plumbers. They've spotted
you, you see. They're thinking to themselves: 'Here's a fellow on
board here, and in the Ould Counthry we'd be putting gas pipes in his
father's house, and he's down now, and we'll kick him.' Just the same
way they would try to kick us too, if they didn't think we was down
already, beyant the likes of them to kick," he added in a grim tone,
"if they didn't know that we knew how to fix them. If they come prying
at ye again, Scholar--listen now to what I'm tellin' ye: Turn yourself
around sideways to them, and says you to them, says you: 'Ask me
elbow!' says you. And if they shoves their face up against you, says
you: 'I'll spit in your eye if you shove your face at me like that!'
And hit, Scholar, hit! It's different with the likes of us. You came
in among us like a man; anybody could see you wasn't accustomed to us.
Now you know what I mean--you understand?" said Mike, for he felt there
was more in his mind than he could express. "I would rather go on a
boat with you, Scholar, than with thim, if it was a case of taking to
the boats; and if it was a row on the waterfronts I'd rather have you
with your back to the wall with me than them plumbers. You was born
different, and you don't understand thim--ye see what I mane," and he
waved his hand. "But you would niver roll a shipmate; and if it came
to the bit, I can see it in your eye, Scholar, you'd hang on like a
bulldog."
Scholar felt a great friendliness in his heart to this man, though he
feared he could not quickly learn the lesson, and would have to think
out some method of his own. The "spit in your eye" method of address
was foreign to him as yet. Mike had been shouting towards the end, for
the wind was rising; but now he paused a spell, and his gaze roved
round the night and its stars. He drew a deep breath and returned to
matters mundane.
"That watchman will have to keep his eyes open to-night," he said.
"He's another of them." He frowned, looking along the decks forward.
"I wonder if that feller wi' the big hat is along there yet--like a
dead burrd in a nest. He's blamed unsociable, that feller in the big
hat," he commented. And then: "Oh, I don't blame him if he wants to be
that way."
"Perhaps he's afraid of being asked questions," suggested Scholar,
laughing.
"Him! No, it's different with him. I said: 'Good evening mate,' to
him the other night there, and he pays no attintion. And I looks at
him, and he gives me the look--you know what I mane; so I says to him,
says I: 'All right, shipmate,' I says. 'All right, if that's the way
of it. I know now, anyhow,' says I to him, says I. He's a great lad,
ye know. I was hearing about a bit of a spar him and the cook had."
He considered the darkened deck. "Yes, he could fix them two plumbers
all right that was asking you questions."
Scholar had a certain depression in his heart. Mike was perhaps aware
of it.
"Oh, I'd rather have you than him any day, all the same," said Mike, as
if in response to a spoken regret at inability to learn the ways of the
society on board. "I think I'll turn in now. Remember what I was
telling ye about them gas-fitters."
Mike rattled down the companion-way, but Scholar remained on deck. A
faint sound of voices came from below, now and then a laugh. The decks
throbbed with the everlasting engine; a hissing and a scudding went
along the weather side; a sheep snuffled and bleated; a little while
ago fresh lashings had been put round their pens, tarpaulin dodgers
protecting the tops. There seemed to be nobody about; here and there a
lozenge of golden light, of deck lights, showed. The night was fallen
almost as dark as the smoke from the smoke-stack. The _Glory_ tossed
and slid, tossed and slid onward; spray rattled with a sound like
handfuls of shot on the tops of the sheep-protecting tarpaulins. From
forward the sea's assaults began to sound more loudly, with many a
resonant clap, and then the rattling as of grape shot followed.
Scholar thought he would go below, among his fellows. Friendliness was
very dear to him. It was only prying and worming into him that ever
caused his jaw to tighten, his eyes to narrow, as he wondered what the
stage directions might be.
CHAPTER XIV
When Scholar descended out of the tearing night he choked like an
asthmatical man. It was not now a smell as of fresh cattle that filled
the cattlemen's safe, called cabin; it was a suffocating smell as of
ammonia. Somebody was singing in the cabin that rose and fell with
steely and wooden screams, and with whispers of the sea running round
it, the tremendous sea that swirled and broke and sprayed on the other
side of the thin iron plates. The tobacco smoke was perhaps not quite
so thick to-night, for tobacco was growing scarce; but there were still
plenty of pipes a-going for blue clouds to temper the callous glare of
the electric light.
Scholar slipped into the cabin, feeling for a moment almost shy. He
had learned how to come into the cabin when it was a kind of bedlam;
but to come into it now, and find it a kind of temperance sing-song
hall for poor seamen, with several of the poor seamen glancing at him
in a way that suggested their thought was: "Ah! we'll ask him to sing
next!" was a little upsetting. He tried to efface himself in his bunk.
The applause following a heartrending solo about "For the flag he gave
his young life!" had just ended.
"Charles will give us a solo upon the mouth organ," said someone.
Charles looked bashful; it was one thing to play the mouth organ on the
dock front while the others double-shuffled (or, for that matter, to
play it on an ordinary evening when the ordinary life was going on,
some listening, others talking, voices roaring: "You're a liar!" others
bellowing: "Shut up!") but quite another to have everybody quiet even
before he began to play. Charles screamed that he was "fed up with the
thing!" and very likely felt a qualm in his heart so soon as the words
left his lips, for he was not at all "fed up" with his mouth organ; he
was very keen on it.
Many coaxed him, and one-eyed Michael said: "Well, never mind if you
don't want to play. Don't worry the young fellow if he doesn't feel
inclined. Jimmy there will play."
Jimmy had been shouting: "Go on, Charlie!" For a moment he was like a
sailing ship taken aback, but he plucked up courage, and accepting the
instrument that Charles handed to him, wiped it with his sleeve and
began to play. Some rose and tried to dance, but did not find dancing
easy, for the gale was rising, and the stern rose and swung and fell
and leapt up. They danced, collided, and fell, danced again, and the
onlookers whooped with amusement, or smiled with mild disdain and pity;
and the mouth organ warbled, while the sea echoed and whispered round.
Candlass, appearing unexpectedly with a lamp, brought the man with the
mouth organ to a stop, and the dancers reeled to their bunks, where
they sat down laughing.
"Mike!" said Candlass. "Oh, you're there, Mike. Bring two or three of
the men forward with you."
Mike slipped over his bunk side; three or four others rolled out of
their own accord, the Inquisitive One among them, for though it must be
a call to work of some kind, and he was not eager for extra work, he
simply must know what was afoot.
"That will do," said Candlass. "I just want you to come along here and
see to some of these ropes before you turn in."
Away they went along the reeking decks. The cattle were not in a bad
plight at all; they had their four legs to stand upon, and propped each
other as well. It was those upon the lee side that gave most concern
to Candlass now. He carried the lamp high, casting weird shadows, and
directing the men in the slacking of a rope here, the hauling up of one
yonder. There was no doubt that the gale was rising; sailors were
battening down a hatch overhead, and their voices, as they hailed each
other before they got the whole hatch covered, shutting out the night,
came down broken and blown. Seas came over the decks, smacking like
the flat of a great hand, and rushed past. Now that the hatches were
battened down there was a kind of confined feeling--the long deck
above, and the steer-packed deck below, converged in the perspective,
and gave a feeling as of being buried alive in a monstrous box full of
a dance of weird lights and shadows.
Their work over, Candlass said: "That'll do, men. I'd better have a
man or two up to-night, along with the watchman."
"All right," answered Mike, looking forward to the variety.
"No, no--not you," said Candlass. "You fellows can go back."
Away they went along the choking decks, one or another pausing now and
then to scratch, with closed fists--fingers being useless to the big
beasts--some head that thrust forward inviting. Others, when a head
leant out determinedly, smote at it to make way--but most, by this
time, had desisted from such methods, and were more inclined to make
friends with the steers. They met Rafferty as they were on their way
back.
"Where's Candlass?" he asked them.
"He's behind."
"Oh, he's behind, is he? Are you fellows going to have another man or
two up with the watchman?"
"I was just talking about it," came Candlass's voice, he walking aft in
the rear; "but I guess I'll stop up myself."
"All right," said Rafferty. "I'll relieve you then, if you tell me
when."
They passed on to the cabin, Candlass following to thrust his head in
and look sharply till silence fell.
"You fellows," he said, "if I come and call on you to-night, turn out
lively."
"All right, boss," several shouted, but Candlass had already turned
away.
All were soon asleep; but, as it happened, there was no night call. On
a night like this, even if the bosses had not been about on the decks,
the little trick of loosening some steers in distaste for the
night-watchman or for Rafferty would have been allowed to lapse. All
slept, or at least all were silent; for perhaps here and there, in a
bunk, someone lay staring at the electric lights that were never put
out, and could not be put out, there being no switch in the cabin, lay
staring and wondering at the whole business, the deep breathing, the
occasional sighs, the place ringing to the blows of the sea, and
echoing, as though someone whispered to the sweep of the spray without;
the whirl of the driving propeller going on and on, as if for ever,
under foot.
They thought at first, when they were called, that it was a night call,
woke gasping in the reek of ammonia, to find Candlass going his rounds
along a sloping deck, the _Glory_ now having a tremendous list on,
never swinging up to a level, but rolling all the time from the degrees
of that list to a slope comparable with that of a church steeple, an
almost anxious slope, then back up again, and pitching, too. The men
who were already wakened began to shout: "Tumble up! Tumble up!" even
before Rafferty appeared; and there was little need for him to raise
his cry, for almost all were awake and rolling from their bunks as he
lurched in at the door and glared round. The wind shrieked outside,
the cabin echoed more than ever like a steel drum, the screams and
groanings were infinitely louder. Candlass looked at his men to see
what fettle they were in, but he had already arrived at an opinion and
a computation regarding what men could be relied on in the event of
emergency.
"Come on!" said Mike, and led the way.
Scholar followed, Michael came next. It was very dark. They went
along on the windward side. All the cattle there had their broad
fronts against the making-fast board, their heads over it. The men
moved along, propped against the hoardings to leeward. The cattle on
that side were standing well back, leaning against each other, tails
against the backboards. As they manoeuvred forward a faint glow showed
to starboard, which had nothing to do with the scattered lamps that,
from the beams above, swung round and round in circles. One hatch (and
only one) was still uncovered, and down that the shrieking and roaring
song of the gale came. Mike poised along ahead like one walking on a
steep roof. Up soared the _Glory_, and down she plunged, and over she
rolled--farther over, trembling down. The cattle staggered; there was
a sound of clicking horns, there were sounds of things going slide and
crash all over, and still she rolled. She had a list on her beyond
anything that Mike had ever known. He hung on with his right hand; he
was under the hatch now, Scholar a pace or two behind, and both could
look up at the dark sky overhead showing purple before the beginning of
another day. It was then four o'clock. And as she hung over thus they
watched the stars rush wildly up the sky like soaring rockets, up and
over, and then up came the sea, following the soaring stars. It gave
them pause. So far over did she hang that, from where they held tight
upon the windward side, they could see clean through the hatch above,
and over its lee edge, right out to the junction of sky and sea (a
strip of awesome whiteness, or less whiteness than the colourless look
of a glass of water) beyond an unforgettable tremendous tossing waste
of a deep and velvety purple. And still she hung over, so that they
saw more and more of the sea. It seemed to be rushing at them with all
its great dark purple hollows, its purple hillsides, its snowy crests.
And in that moment Scholar averted his eyes from it and looked toward
Mike, and found Mike--hanging on--looking over his shoulder rearward.
Their eyes met. And Scholar believed that perhaps Mike was right in
his view of him that he had voiced the day before when the gale was
rising--believed that when it came to the "bit" he would not be found
wanting.
[Illustration: It seemed to be rushing at them with all its dark purple
hollows, its purple hillsides, its snowy crests.]
Then the stars that had rushed up came rushing down again, bringing the
sky with them, and it fitted over in place. The _Glory_ rolled and
pitched onward, still with something of a list, but no following roll
sent her so far over, and from no succeeding roll was she so slow to
rise again.
CHAPTER XV
A few of the pickpocket-faced ones hung back during the gale that
morning, crawled into corners, effacing themselves, like sick cats. At
the afternoon feeding and watering (despite the words of contempt,
glances of contempt, and, worst of all, silences of contempt, bestowed
upon them when they showed face at their own feeding-time) several did
not turn out, pretended to do so--perhaps tried to do so--but slunk
back to the cabin. When Rafferty, missing them, came aft to hunt them
forth, they showed their peeked faces to him, worn and scared; and he
despised them and left them, turned back to his working majority again
and shouted through the shouting of the storm overhead, and the rushing
of the draught along his deck: "There's some chickens, some chickens!"
His men knew to whom he referred, looked at him--and sneered, and
laughed, and tossed their heads in agreement; Jack even, whose attitude
to Rafferty so far had been one of watchfulness, gave a kind of loud
mutter of: "We don't want them with us, messing about here." Cockney
too, energetic straw-boss, looked on them as did Rafferty.
"Let 'em lie there and shiver, then," he said.
Only two of the main deck men were perturbed beyond labour by the
steadily increasing violence of the gale, scared by the consideration
that it had begun to blow last night, and had been getting worse and
worse ever since.
"Two men short!" commented Candlass in the afternoon, and went aft to
the cabin to look for them, found one on the way, behind a bale of hay,
peered at him as if wondering what he was doing there, balancing
carefully with loose knees, taking hand from pocket only to grab and
hang on by a protruding end of barricade. He eyed him as a man may eye
a newly-bought puppy that has gone in between the sofa's end and the
wall. The youth got up, scrambled out as best he could, hauled himself
to his feet. Candlass spoke never a word, but bowed to him in the
attitude of one listening for a whisper, mock-commiserating, and the
youth dragged himself forward to find that his fellows did not want
him, had fallen to work passing the hay themselves, and were inclined
to treat him as if he was in the way. He had the air as of pleading to
be allowed to do something. Candlass, meanwhile, walked on into the
cabin, zig-zagged across, looking for his other missing man.
There were two of the lower deck hobbledehoys there. He waggled a
thumb at the door, and they got up and crawled out, but he did not
follow them; he went up on deck instead, to hunt out the man who was
missing from his own deck in particular. The sheep sniffled and
bleated occasionally under securely-lashed dodgers that now covered the
tops of all the pens. They saw his feet and thrust out their black
faces, wrinkled their noses, shivered and withdrew. It was near their
feed time. (Mike and Cockney, with two or three others, saw to them
daily on their way back, after having tended the cattle.) Candlass
tilted his body along, looking left and right to see where his man
might be hiding, the ship ever and again pausing in the midst of a
rise, pausing much as men on deck did at a more violent and unexpected
roll and kick. Some greater wave, at such times, had caught her fair,
and smashing upon her hull as on a cliff, raced whirling along the
length of her, shot up her side, soared thinly there beyond the
bulwark, to be immediately blown wide, as is the top of a fountain in
the wind, scudding and rattling along the decks. Tarpaulins had been
rigged entirely across her, below the bridge, to protect the sheep on
the after deck; and as far as to that barrier did Candlass now strut,
tilting and balancing. And there, in a space between two sheep-pens,
beside a ventilator, he saw a pair of boot-soles, bent down and grabbed
at the legs beyond them, and the face of the missing man looked up at
him--green. It was sea-sickness. Candlass stooped low.
"Sick?" he said.
The man's eyes rolled. He clung desperately to the ventilator.
"Don't fall overboard, don't want to lose a man. Savvey?"
The man tried to nod; his whole body sagged forward in that effort.
"You lie on your back when you ain't actually being sick," Candlass
roared into his ear. "Savvey?"
Again the man tried to nod and at least succeeded in making his head go
up and down instead of being powerless to keep it from doing aught but
rolling left and right.
"Don't fall overboard," Candlass counselled again, and lurched away,
muttering to himself: "Sick all right."
But most of the men enjoyed the gale. It was something doing. And
when, next morning, the pickpocket-faced youth sat up ready to give his
shout of: "Call me in another hour, Rafferty, and bring me me shaving
water," his voice failed. He looked round the cabin; he had been one
of the shirkers yesterday.
"That's right," said one of the men. "You keep your mouth shut this
morning!" And the gunsel and his special cronies kept quiet, for it
was unfitting that those who skulked in a corner during a gale should
cheek Rafferty the morning after merely because they found that the
swing and sweep of the tossing stern were back a little more to the
normal. The gale had indeed blown itself out, or nearly so. It was a
tremendous morning in the North Atlantic. A fountain of gold,
preceding sunrise, shot up eastwards. A sound of hissing and of
breaking foam was round the ship, and echoed in every corner. The
waves soared, great and curving, blue and purple, veined like marble in
their forward curves with the foam of other broken waves, soared
higher, curled their tops, broke, and as they broke the wind took the
foam and whirled it broadcast. There was a wonderful purple and blue
and windy hilarity over that great expanse, so high a sea running that
even the horizon line was ragged.
The grub that day seemed painfully scanty. The uneaten shares of the
one or two seasick men made no difference, so great were the appetites
of the fit. Cockney admitted, after the meal was over, that he
sympathised with those persons who chummed with, or intimidated, Pierre
and Four Eyes, for the sake of what food they might smuggle away from
the galley--though his phrasing of this comprehension was of course all
his own.
"Are they cadgin' off Frenchy and that object in the coat?" asked Mike.
"'Aven't you seen 'em?" said Cockney. "'O, Frenchy, bring hus along
some pie!'" he cried out in a fleering voice.
"I quite belave it," said Mike. "I see some of 'em cadgin' tobacco.
There's men aboard this ship I know I wouldn't prisint me plug of
tobacco to. If they took a bite out of it you'd be thinkin' the plug
was in their mouth, and the chaw they axed for was the piece they gave
back to ye." There was an attempt at a laugh, an obvious attempt, for
the shot had gone home. "'Have ye got a piece of chewing on ye?'"
mocked Mike. "'Me pipe's empty, have you a fill about ye?'--'Have ye a
ceegareet about ye?'" He paused. "'After you wid the ceegareet!'" he
mocked.
And he lived up to his opinion. There are people who arrange their
moral code according to what they can do and cannot do. There are
people to whom a fall from fealty to their code is occasion for
renouncing and deriding that code. Mike was not of these. He disliked
cadging, but had his love of a smoke or a chew driven him to cadge he
would not have relinquished his opinion; he would have smoked and
chewed as a defeated man.
All day now there was sign of better weather. Even the wind aided to
calm the seas, swinging round a point or two and besoming the
wave-tops, flattening them. There was hash and pea-soup that day--the
pea-soup drunk in the tin mugs, of course, along with, or after, the
hash--and the "Push" were glad of it. It was a great tonic day. By
night all the clouds seemed to have been blown away; stars by the
billion filled the vault; the Milky Way was like a whirl of triumph,
like a gesture of joy across the heavens. The wake of the tiny little
_Glory_ (she seemed tiny now) was as an imitation of that Milky Way,
full of balls, large and small, and smaller, down to the size of sparks
even, of phosphorus--dancing and bursting and thinning out. Mike,
coming on deck a trifle disgusted by a surfeit of what he called
"soup-kitchen palaver" that was in progress amid a group of "youse,"
looked down at that wake, moody, and furrowed, that kind of half-broken
look upon his face, like a wondering beast, a puzzled beast. He stood
there at the stern, lifted high and brought low, till his back went
cold.
"Bejabbers, it's all very strange," he said to himself; and being cold
he looked round for shelter. Some wisps of hay, blown from windward,
had been brought up against the lee rail, and he gathered them
together. The sheep bleated.
"I'm using this for me own comfort," he said, addressing the sheep in
the end cote; "go to sleep!" And he squatted down with his back
against the cotes, and stretched out his legs--sat there a long time
while the ship pulsed and pulsed on, tossing her stern and the engines
racing and steadied, racing and steadied, as she slid through the sea,
churning the water into foam, in which whirls of gold began like
nebulas of stars, whirled into complete little globes, danced away as
entrancing as opals, and then suddenly went out.
Now it happened that, below, Scholar felt he might almost suffocate,
and remembering that he had been some time out of the weather, for
which he had always a great friendliness, never liking to be too long
out of touch with it--blow high, blow low, rain, mist or sunshine--he
too came on deck. The poop companion-way had been closed these last
few days, and that made the cabin all the more asphyxiating. He came
up that narrow staircase, feet clattering on the worn brass edges,
turned the handle; eddies of wind did the rest. He wrestled a spell
with the door, then came on deck, closed the door, and looked up in awe
at all these stars--stood there balancing, now drawn away from them
down and down, next moment soaring and swinging up with a sensation as
if he might be swung on and come up through that golden dust and see
some explanation. Then down he was borne again, or felt as though his
body was borne down and his spirit left up there. Explanation, or no
explanation, it was good--all good, the crying of the sea, the whistle
and shriek of the wind in the cordage, the feel of the wind, the scud
of the spray--good!
He turned and looked forward. There seemed to be not a soul on deck.
It was as if he had dropped from a star, forgetting all about it on the
way, and had alighted gently upon this thing that, reeking
volcano-like, tossed and swung, but always forward through the night.
He had almost to take it on faith that there was a man in that
hardly-discernible little barrel on the foremast, the summit of which
raked from left to right. He peered up at the bridge. Yes, something
moved there from port to starboard and back again, like a mouse running
to and fro on a shelf. Below his feet the ceaseless whirl and whirl
went on. A man suddenly appeared, jumping up on top of the sheep pens,
tapping with his toe before him, then stepping, to be sure he stood on
firm board top and not on tarpaulin cover, turned the top of a
ventilator, disappeared, bobbed up again, revealed against the starry
sky, or at any rate revealed from his head down to about his knees, the
wind pluck-pluck-plucking at his short jacket. He disappeared again,
jumping down and was gone. Scholar moved to one side, kicked something
soft, looked down and said: "Oh, I beg your pardon!" and a coarse Irish
voice answered: "All right, Scholar."
There was fresh movement at Scholar's feet.
"I seen ye against the stars, but ye couldn't see me. Bring yourself
to an anchor here beside me--I have some straw here--and give us your
crack."
Scholar, peering down, was now able to make out where Mike reclined,
and sat down beside him, back against the end of the last sheep-pen.
But they did not speak at once. Scholar felt in his pocket for pipe
and tobacco, and held the tobacco-bag to Mike.
"Have a fill?" he said.
Mike put forth a hand, and drew it back.
"No," he growled.
"I've a plug of chewing-tobacco somewhere," said Scholar. "Yes--here
it is."
Out went Mike's hand, then abruptly back again; and this time he thrust
both hands deep in pockets.
"No, thank you, Scholar."
Scholar wondered if he had given some offence. Ignorant of how to
repel in this society in which he found himself, he might also, even in
sitting down in response to Mike's invitation, ignorantly have
transgressed some usage of courtesy in this sphere. Next moment Mike
explained.
"When I see the way the fellers on this ship go cadgin' for tobacco it
gives me a pain." He shifted his position slightly, as if he really
felt a physical pain. "I would think shame to keep on axing a man day
after day--_many_ times a day--'Have you got any chewing? Have you got
any smoking?'"
"That's all right," said Scholar. "You didn't ask me--I offered to
you."
"Yes, yes, I know; but I said to meself: 'Thim fellers has no daycency.
I'll do without chewings and smokings until I get to Liverpool.' No,
Scholar, thank you kindly--I'll go wanting it. It has too much hold
upon me as it is."
Scholar did not press.
CHAPTER XVI
Now there began to be signs of how the cattlemen would wander off
together when they came to land again. Understandings seemed to be
arrived at between threes and fours and half-dozens. It was not
exactly cliquishness--it was more a case of "birds of a feather"--No,
that simile is bad, as are most ready-made proverbs. Not their outward
parts, their mere feathers, but their inner parts arranged the
groupings. The snarling was all over; drink, and the effects of drink,
were old stories. One or two men, of course, were still left alone by
all, men so different as the Man with the Hat and the Man with the
Specs. Frenchy, or Pierre, his tobacco nearly done, and his
complaisance in giving it away in a like state, was now discarded by
some of the former spongers, but not by all. Probably those who had
been interested in him, as well as sponging upon him, were the ones who
now besought him to sing a French song, or to tell them what France
looked like.
The feeding and watering were by this time matters of routine, wakening
at four a habit. The cabin was almost tenantless, only the
cold-blooded, or those children of the slums who felt out of their
element unless they slept in rancid air, turned in there. Among the
diminishing hay near the hatches--all open again--or on the upper deck,
around the smoke-stack, and between the sheep-pens, most of the men
slept, snatching a nap during the day when the cattle did not call
them, sleeping there at night until only the extreme cold drove them
down, with short gasps, from the windy deck to the asthmatical cabin.
It was, indeed, easier to tolerate the cabin by day than by late night,
for by day, and early in the morning, there was some tobacco smoke--not
much now, to be sure--and the companion was open. At night the tobacco
smoke soon ceased to combat with the ammonia fumes as the men slept,
and some of the cold-blooded were sure to mount up and shut the
companion-door before turning in, making the cabin's atmosphere more
stifling still.
They began to talk of reaching Liverpool, of what they would do there,
to ask each other: "You coming back on her?" Cockney and Michael
exchanged friendly speech again. It is doubtful which started, but
they were again conversing. The Inquisitive One begged Frenchy to
"come with us," indicating the group round him; but Pierre explained
that he was going home. One told another about the loss of Frenchy's
valise, and Mike's recovery of it, as he might tell of the incident on
another ship one day if Frenchmen, or valises, were mentioned. Many of
the men fell to rubbing their chins, and announcing that they would be
the better of a shave. They asked each other: "Have you a razor?"
Frenchy taking warning by the cadging of tobacco that left him
smokeless now, pretended that he didn't know what "razor" meant, was
unusually dense to signs, could not be got to understand of what they
talked. Somebody commented that he _must_ have a shave, that they all
should shave, looked too tough, that the day after to-morrow, perhaps,
they would be in Liverpool, and if they went ashore like this they'd be
taken for cadgers by everybody.
Scholar took pity on them. He had managed to shave twice already,
despite the sea running. Now he offered the loan of his razor to one
man; and many others asked to be next. Some of them sneered, both at
the razor and at those who wished to use it. At any rate Scholar,
carefully propped, had his shave; and others--each using his razor,
each handing the razor back to him when finished. Thus, at least, they
acted to begin with.
"I wonder," said Mike, approaching him, "if ye would lend me the loan
of your razor, Scholar, if it's not too much to be asking ye."
"Certainly," answered Scholar, and Mike had his shave, then gave the
razor back. Another man had it, and thereafter there was no more talk
of the razor for an hour or two, when suddenly several were asking
where it was, and it was impossible to tell who had it. Mike was
greatly upset.
"I don't like it at all," he said, "not at all. Here's Scholar being
kind to youse, and there's some of you fellers can't see anything
without putting it in your pockut."
He looked round the crowd. Harry of the mad eyes sat humped, nursing
his knees, and smiling in front of him. Jack was smiling too, a
cynical smile it might be, however. Johnnie, over his shoulder, asked
them to shut up about that razor. Mike's eye rested with suspicion on
Mad Harry, but he was unshaven; still, that didn't signify. Cockney,
with a clean bandage on his head, tried to thrash out the question of
who had used the razor last. It was a task more thorny than
discovering who turned out the gas for fun at the Philanthropists'
Teetotal Hand Out. Little Michael, beginning to peer under his
eye-patch now--with an eye and a half, as it were--grumbled a great
deal about the disappearance. It would give a man who didn't know them
such a poor opinion of cattlemen! Mike turned his troubled face to
Michael, puzzling over him; with no vocabulary to express his feelings
he wondered dumbly if Michael really had so high an opinion of a
"Push." The Inquisitive One drew Scholar aside anxiously, and with
intense eagerness asked him: "You don't think I got it, do you?"
"No, no," said Scholar. "That's all right--don't worry about it."
"No, but I wouldn't like you to think I had it--straight I wouldn't."
Mike was gloomy all that day. At night there was again a sing-song,
but it was not a very great success. One man, called upon for a song,
said he couldn't sing; another said: "Get on your feet and sing. What
the hell's the matter with you? Are you sitting on the razor?"
Another, who had danced a breakdown without being asked, was told that
he was no dancer, and that if that there razor could only be found he'd
have his throat cut.
Mike watched to see which men found these recurrent references merely
amusing, which looked disgusted, which appeared guilty; but it was
impossible even to begin the winnowing in that way. A flutter of more
pleasant talk ricocheted about, Molls and Biddies, and what not--names
of streets, descriptions of where they lay. One man stood up and sang
the praises of a certain lady friend. Mike's eyes opened wide and he
stared; his face gloomed. He shot out a hand, pointing at the man.
"Do you know what I'm going to tell you about her?" he said. Faces
turned to see what Mike had to say, and he said. The man looked
belligerent for a moment.
"No, no!" cried Mike to those who laughed. "No, no! I'm not talking
fanciful. I know the woman."
That settled it. Those who had listened believed that she was beneath
contempt, for there was verity in Mike's gesture. One of those from
the lower deck, who had been in the razor queue, and was grateful,
called to Scholar: "If you don't know Liverpool, Michigan," evidently
he had heard whence Scholar had come, "you come with me. There's a
moll I know--you'll like her."
"Pay no attintion to them," broke in Mike. "Them fellers sees a crimp
in a petticoat and they starts singing about her."
"That's right," agreed another. "Don't you go with him. You come
along of me." He looked Scholar up and down. He would be rather proud
to introduce Scholar, as a shipmate, to the lady in question.
Mike growled: "Scholar's coming with me," and turning to Scholar, very
friendly, his manner reminiscent in a far-off way of a kindly host:
"You come with me, Scholar," he said. "There's a fine motherly woman I
know----" and he nodded. "I'll put you on to her."
Scholar wondered if he should say: "Thank you very much." Instead he
drew at his empty pipe and looked at nothingness before him; and the
propeller whirled, and the screws beat on.
"What a queer homecoming these fellows know," he thought.
CHAPTER XVII
The feeding of cattle and of men was over for the afternoon. Scholar
was the first up on the poop. He leant over the rail, looking away out
and forward. The south end of Ireland was off there somewhere, out of
sight, northwards. The _Glory_ surged on, in a pother of spray, a mile
of smoke trailing from her smoke-stack a point or two off the bows,
southward. There was a touch of humidity in the air that was not the
humidity of the sea. It could not be said that Scholar had enjoyed the
trip any more than any of them, but nearing home the call of home
seemed to be an open question. In this riff-raff below him he had
found something likeable, something good amid all the evil. The people
at home, where he was going, he knew, could not appreciate one word
that he might have to tell of the voyage or the men. No, if they
pitied, it would be a very patronising pity, and even that annulled by
censure. His womenfolk would find only one more opportunity to say:
"What awful creatures men are!" Last night he had pitied these men
that they had no homes to go to. To-day, alert for Ireland, near home,
the sentimental glow was fading from the vision of his own. He felt
himself homeless as they. And then ahead there, northwards in the sea,
he beheld something advancing rapidly.
Some of the other men came on deck, among them Mike, who drew near and
looked in the direction of Scholar's gaze; and just then Scholar saw
what it was that came like a low cloud through the many foam-topped,
spray-topped waves--a blue-grey warship, lying low, with four short
funnels, a very short mast; and he experienced a thrill. He had met
Englishmen who were less moved than Frenchmen by such lines as those
that tell of how "the coastwise lights of England watch the ships of
England go." If they had objected to the same poet's: "Lord of our
far-flung battle line," to the Hebraic self-righteousness in that, he
could have been at one with them; that was a different matter. He
appreciated Kipling's song of the "coastwise lights of England." He
also appreciated Arnold's reminder to Victorian Englishmen that England
could be improved; but he loved the England that Arnold, in his love,
made to bloom and flower in such poems as his "Scholar Gipsy," that
England that coloured the same poet's "Resignation." It struck him
that the Englishman who could not tolerate a song simply because the
name of England was in it would be highly repulsive and irksome even to
Arnold, who so often lectured Englishmen upon their self-satisfaction.
They could not understand, these people; the moment they were left
alone they strayed. The road was pointed out to them time and again,
and off they went, but the moment they were alone they deviated into
paths that led otherwise, without knowing.
Scholar felt a thrill at sight of this long, low vessel that came with
tremendous speed, wasp-like, sweeping out from the haze beyond which
lay home. It might be a slightly tarnished home, the house not all in
order, but, by God, it was home, and worth loving and setting in order.
He had a feeling as of: "How they do watch!" There was nobody on her
decks. She was a thing of beauty, although of steel. She was nearly
abreast now, but far off. Then suddenly, hammering along between the
sheep-pens (the tarpaulins off them now) came a man in haste the
bo'sun--and as he ran this way sternwards upon the deck of the _Glory_,
there appeared, as out of a hole in the deck of that long, low wasp of
a thing, a small black spot that ran sternwards upon it. The bo'sun
was already at the flagpole, loosening the flag halyard, the flag was
dipping, and a little square of cloth, away off there on that other
ship, was dipping too, down and up. She slid past, rushing through the
sea; the spot went forward on her and disappeared again; she was hidden
in the smoke reeking from her four short stacks.
Mike, behind Scholar, expelled a gust of air from his nostrils and drew
erect.
"Bedad!" he said. "I guess she can smell us that far."
It had not occurred to Scholar before; and thereafter, when more ships
began to appear, where the sea-trails of the world converged, he
imagined the people on their decks all holding their noses.
CHAPTER XVIII
A callous-looking grey morning was breaking in the Mersey. Now and
then, when a bell-buoy heaved, the bell tolled. It was just like
that--tolling, tolling them home. Another steamer, swathed in mist,
surged along, behind and a little to the side, but rapidly drawing
level. Captain Williamson, coming to the bridge and gazing astern at
that steamer that was but half vapour, turned away with some agility
after his scrutiny, for she was another cattleboat, and he wanted to be
berthed first. Those members of the "Push," the morning's feeding
being over, who strolled as far forward as to the bridge, heard him
speaking down the tube to the engine room. Sounds of energetic
shovelling came up from the stoke-hole; the _Glory_ put on the pace a
little more as the other ship came level. The _Glory_ led again.
Captain Williamson, pacing the bridge, stirring up the morning haze,
looked pleased. Again the other ship forged level, and he was heard
chanting: "Shake her up! Shake her up!" The cattlemen took up the
refrain, and addressed the deck on which they walked and
double-shuffled, with "Shake her up! Shake her up!"
[Illustration: "Again the cattleships forged level."]
"Oho!" shouted Cockney. "'Ere we are! Two stinks comin' 'ome!"
Michael leant on the rail and gazed at the rival ship with one eye,
raised the shade slightly from the other and looked, to see if it
improved.
"Iberian!" he said. "Iberian!" reading her name upon the bows.
"Hiberian," said Cockney.
"No, you're thinking of the Hibernian," replied Michael, still holding
the shade up and peering, like a man testing new eye-glasses.
Cockney humped his shoulders and shot his face forward, then noticed
Michael lifting that lid over his eye, and his mouth gave a twist of
something like shame, and he turned away.
"It's the S dropped off," said the Inquisitive One. "I came over on
her once--Siberian."
"Nothing of the kind!" said somebody else.
"Oh, gee!" said Mike. "You fellers are always scrapping."
"Well, what is it, then?" they asked him "What is her name?"
"Can't you rade?" asked Mike.
"Yes. But what _is_ her name?"
"It's the S dropped off," Charlie repeated.
Mike shook his shoulders and that baffled look was on his forehead as
he turned from them.
"Oh, indade," he said. "Nobody knows anything about it; and
everybody's talking. You think you know all about it; maybe I think I
know a hell of a lot; but we all know damn-all. If you want to know,
keep your mouth shut till we get ashore. They'll be paid off along of
us likely, and you'll hear what the man at the Board of Trade Office
calls them. She's another ould ship the same as us, and that's enough
to be goin' on with."
"Well, we're forgin a'ead, any'ow," said Cockney.
Suddenly their feet tingled and the sound of the siren came. They
looked round and up. The haze had not thickened again-it was not for
that she whistled.
"She's whistling for the cattle-sheds," somebody said. One of the
others explained that in a race like this the steamer that passed a
certain point first was the first to be unloaded, and the _Glory_ was
whistling to let them know ashore that she had done it. Some of the
youngsters asked the older men if this was so, but they shook their
heads; they did not know. They had often made the trip, but rules
change. "Wait and see," was all that anybody could say.
A radiance began to come down into the haze, and the particles of
moisture sparkled. A glory, a splendour, but ever so tenuous, ever so
frail, was on the river-mist, a mist that waned fainter and fainter.
The men lay along the rail and looked into the mist as though they
sought to make sure of that evanescent radiance in it, to make sure
that it was there, was not a trick of their eyes. The other steamer
had now the air of giving up, fell behind, foot by foot, content to be
second. One of the young men plucked Mike's elbow; he had been in a
knot looking the other way.
"Is that right, Mike?" he asked, pointing to the long melancholy
promenade that showed up ashore. "Is that where the toffs go to pick
up the flash molls?"
"Oh, indade, I don't know," said Mike.
The Inquisitive One fell to chatting with Scholar, but asking questions
in a way wholly different from that of the two catechists whom Scholar
had desired to keep at arm's length--the Cardiff man, and the man from
Fife in Scotland.
"Mike!" he said, suddenly. "Mike, Scholar has a mother!"
"Well, what about it?" asked Mike. "I expect ye had wan yersilf."
The Inquisitive One looked far off briefly, then a new thought came
again to him.
"Got a father?" he asked, turning back to Scholar.
There was a look in Scholar's eyes that seemed somehow akin with that
baffled look that showed in Mike's. He nodded. The Inquisitive One
stood back, hands in pockets, and examined him with great interest.
"You're going _home_?" he said, accentuating the word. "You have a
home?"
Mike turned away slightly. The Inquisitive One waggled his head
sidewise as a sign that he wanted to draw Scholar aside again. Nobody
who heard had jeered; some had pretended not to hear; only the chumming
Welshman and the man from Dysart in Fife, standing together and apart,
looked scorn, hate, contempt at these other two. Scholar was amazed to
see that there were tears in the eyes of the Inquisitive One as he said:
"I often wonder what it's like going home. I've never had a father,
and I've never had a mother. Straight! Will you be coming back on the
ship?"--this suddenly, eagerly.
"I don't know. I think so."
"Tell me all about it when you come back, will yer? I would like to
know."
But they were now being warped into the land, through channels between
dock walls into docks, round the dock walls, sailors coming running
along to hang over rope-fenders. The cattlemen kept quiet. There
seemed to be no end to it. Men on shore caught ropes and ran,
clattering and yelling. It was as if they were dragging for a corpse.
Scholar felt a horror of the land, even as he had felt a horror of
putting out to sea in that safe full of madmen, madmen that he felt now
he would like to know more of--not probing like the Welshman, or the
man from Fife, not even perhaps questioning personally like the
Inquisitive One, but just sailing the seas with them after they had got
over their cups. Suddenly they found that the ship was still. There
was a rope ladder hanging over the other side. A broad-beamed little
steamer lay there. The unruly members of the "Push," the shirk-works,
were piling over the side and down the rope ladder.
"Come on, Mike!" someone called. "Ashore!"
"They're going to lave us to run the cattle ashore!" said Mike,
disgusted, and he swung his legs over. Over they all went, one after
the other, down the rope ladder, and jumped thence on to the bluff
little steamer, where a man in a jersey stood looking at them
curiously, staring; and another, a custom-house man, sat on the further
bulwark watching the descent on the grin. The Man with the Hat came
down, his wrist through the handles of his valise.
"Carry your bag?" jeered the younger men among the cattlemen below.
"Carry your bag, mister?"
But cause for greater amusement was beheld higher up. There was Four
Eyes, wrestling with a small trunk, round which he had made a rope
fast, trying to lower it over the side. They whooped and cheered, they
rocked with delight. "Lower away there!" they shouted. "All clear
below! Drop it in the dock!" They advised him to make fast to the
capstan. As he struggled with the box they suggested that he should
"hail them two fellers on the bridge," and ask them to give him a
hand--namely the pilot and the skipper. The face of Rafferty appeared
over the rail; he gnashed his teeth, he yelped at them.
"It ain't our place to run the cattle ashore," they called back.
Others looked a little forward, turning their heads, for a sharp
whistle had sounded thence. Candlass, standing on the top of a
sheep-pen, raised thumb and forefinger, and beckoned gently with the
finger--then, with his head, gave an inclination inboard.
"Come on youse, then," said Mike. "I knew youse was wrong."
The man in the jersey, who had been standing like a squat effigy, moved
to a rope by which this little craft was moored alongside, pressed feet
to the bulwark, hung on to the rope so that the great hull of the
_Glory_ (she looked a massive thing again) loomed close and they could
stretch out to the rope ladder. Rafferty above hauled in Four Eyes'
trunk with great vehemence, that "poor feller" standing by like a great
child watching the rough-handling of a toy. They swarmed on deck
again. Candlass came aft and stood beside them.
"Stand by, men," he said. "Just wait till we get alongside here."
The ship began to move on again, towards a sound of lowing of cattle
and shouting of men, and Candlass walked forward, left them, and stood
chatting amidships with Rafferty. There appeared suddenly, running
into their midst, swarming on deck like rats, several grimy stokers,
looking for friends, it would appear, among the cattlemen. Mike eyed
the little knots that drew aside.
"If you want your razor, Scholar," he said quietly, "keep your eye on
these fellows. Whoever's got it up here will very likely slip it to
one of his friends in the black hole, for fear of you putting a copper
on them."
The Inquisitive One, standing by, heard the word "copper" and flinched.
"What you say about a copper?" he asked anxiously.
"Now then, some of you fellows," cried Candlass.
"Come on, you fellows," shouted Rafferty.
The willing ones followed them; the shirkers remained, and were not
worried. Indeed all were not required--they would be in each other's
way. They only went below now to knock out the divisions between the
pens with a crow-bar or two, or the back of an axe, or whatever
implement came handy; and as they were so employed the shore-push
thrust in their gangways and swarmed up them.
A couple of men that Mike called "them toffs" were speaking to Candlass
at the top of the gangway that stretched to the main deck. They paid
no heed to the men who had brought the cattle across, or at least
little heed. One of them, once, while talking, roved his eyes from
Candlass along the deck, looked at this cattleman, looked at that, half
absently; saw Scholar, seemed for a moment to be more interested in him
than in the threesome chat; looked then at Mike, up and down, appeared
to measure him as if he thought: "Jove! There's a big fellow!" nodded
"Yes, yes," to Candlass, looked at Mike's face again with an expression
faintly reminiscent of that which had showed on Smithers' face now and
then when he stood beside the wicket of the little movable office in
the back of the shed at Montreal as the Hard Cases trooped up to sign
on. Mike bent down, lifted a board, and stepped forward to a great
steer that thrust its head, and its great long horns, over the front
barricade. The "toff" looked at him, alert, frowning; but all the
movements of these Hard Cases seemed belligerent to strangers, and Mike
might not be going to rough-handle the brute. So he merely watched,
intent. Mike took the end of the board and scrubbed the steer under
its chin as it raised its great head, like a cat wanting to be
scratched; it turned its head round and over slowly, to have the office
well done all round.
"Well, bejabbers, this is your last scratch! You're a fine looking
baste. You might have had a worse trip!" Mike addressed the steer,
that baffled look on his face, and his eyes kindly.
When they did find themselves, anon, rightly upon the shore, they
clustered there, masterless men. Jack asked: "What are we waiting here
for?" His partner said: "I don't know," and swore. Somebody moved
away, saying: "Come on, come on--what are we waiting here for?" and a
few followed him.
"Where are you going?" he was asked.
He admitted that he did not know. A long, thin, grey-faced man drew
nigh and stood beside the knot. Somebody took him into the
conversation, half turning to him, but not looking at him, unaware that
a stranger had joined them, and he answered, but not eagerly, quite
casually. Thus he dropped into the talk: what kind of a trip had they
had? what were they hanging around for? They didn't know. One of them
asked if he was So-and-So, of Such-and-Such a boarding house? He
admitted he was. Was he there still? He merely nodded--it was all
very casual, but it seemed settled soon, seemed to be in the air
somehow that they had arranged that they might as well bunk at his
boarding house as anywhere else.
Then Candlass appeared on the wharf, wearing a white collar instead of
the blue-and-white striped rubber one of the trip. Some of the men
approached him, and he turned in his walk as a housemaster, one
somewhat feared as a rule but respected, turns to hear what some boys
would say to him, who have the air of wondering if they should approach
at all on the day before breakup. He answered gently, easily, seemed
to suggest by his manner that he would see them through as well as
possible, but that even he was in the clutch of circumstance. It was
with the hint of a shrug and with a little toss of the head and a half
smile that he left them. The crowd formed afresh around those who had
spoken to him.
"What does he say? What does he say?"
"Well," said Mike, sticking a hand under his belt, "we may as well
drift up that way, then." "That way" was the Board of Trade Office.
"See you later on," said the boarding house man.
"Are you going away?" asked somebody, who perhaps felt homeless.
"Oh, I'll be back--I'll meet you up there."
"What does he say? What does he say?" He had drifted away.
"Who the hell is he?" asked one with a mania for trying to make others
quarrelsome, and then backing out. The older hands filed off; the
others followed. The Inquisitive One saw their resemblance to a
procession as they drew aside to let a traction engine go past, a
rattling, smoking, devil-waggon, pulling a string of lorries laden with
swaying beer kegs. He took out his mouth organ. Rattling and
deafening the engine and drays quivered by, the men shouting: "Oh,
beer!" or: "How would you like to get all them inside you?" The
procession went on, the irresponsible tail-end of it cake-walking, and
the mouth organ, with full tremolo, in full blast, made music for it
with the air of a bottle-song of the halls.
CHAPTER XIX
The "Push" came to a halt before the Board of Trade building. The less
juvenile, and the elders, looked broodingly at it. The younger fry
sparred, and danced, and fought for possession of the mouth organ. Now
and then a man who leant against a wall of the neighbourhood would
catch the eye of one of the youths in the crowd and nod amiably, and
the man nodded at would either look away quickly, or would tauten his
legs and chuck his chest a little, look up the wall behind the man who
had pretended to be an acquaintance, slow, casual, and so extricate
himself. Now and then somebody who really knew one of the group would
approach, and all would look at him shrewdly to see what his intentions
might be.
A voice came: "You're there, are you?" It was Rafferty. Cheerily he
was asked when the pay-off would be. "Oh, not for some time yet," he
said. One man announced a wish that they could get something to eat;
and that set them all a-going with their wishes. A few had a coin or
two left. It was for something to eat that the Inquisitive One raised
his plaintive voice.
"I have half-a-crown or so," said Scholar. "Come and let us have
breakfast. Come and have some breakfast, Mike," he added, turning.
Two others ran close, approaching him in a kind of cake-walk, inviting
themselves. "I don't think I've enough money," said Scholar.
"We'll stop here," said Mike, wheeling round again.
"Come on," answered Scholar.
"No!"
"I _am_ hungry," said the Inquisitive One.
Scholar and he headed for a cheap restaurant, but Mike refused to
accompany them and jeered at those who showed signs of intending to
follow, so that they subsided. The man behind the counter nodded
pleasantly to them and wished them good morning, and the early waitress
rustled after them to a marble-topped table. The Inquisitive One felt
nervous, but Scholar's suggestion of ham and eggs made his eyes bulge.
Large cups of coffee were brought, rolls of butter, and the ham and
eggs.
"I can do with this," murmured Charles.
The girl waited. Scholar wondered why; then, even as it struck him
that perhaps he was expected to pay before eating, she turned away.
"Ain't yer goin' to give her the money?" asked Charlie in a worried
voice.
"Oh!" said Scholar. "Oh, of course, that's what she was waiting for."
Charlie looked at him a trifle suspiciously. Was it possible that this
man was one of those swell crooks in embarrassed circumstances? Was he
beginning his daring fancy tricks and games of bluff the moment he got
ashore? Here was out of such company for him! The girl was walking
over to the man behind the counter, he looking up expectant, for she
had evidently something to say.
"I'd better pay you," called Scholar, and she came back smiling.
"It's the rule," she said. "I was just going to ask the boss, seeing
you--thank you," for he put the coin in her hand.
They took up knife and fork, and as they did so the girl returned to
say, quite sweetly: "Didn't notice. The manager says this is an
American coin."
[Illustration: "The manager says this is an American coin."]
Charlie sat back and went limp; he looked from one to the other, mouth
open.
"So it is," said Scholar easily. "I wasn't thinking. I haven't got
anything else, either--I have only American money. Still, that's the
same as two shillings; that will be all right, won't it?"
Charlie pushed his plate forward on the table, pushed his coffee cup
forward. The girl departed, and the manager called: "I'm not supposed
to take foreign money, but that's all right. Have your breakfasts.
The money-changing places aren't open yet."
"By gee, you'll get run in!" whispered the Inquisitive One. "Get run
in!" He pushed the dishes still farther from him.
"Thank you very much," answered Scholar, looking to the manager.
"Perhaps you could send somebody out to get the money changed." He
smiled cheerfully. "You don't know us, and we might run off."
"Oh, that's all right--there's a place just across the street," said
the man behind the counter. (The girl put down the fifty-cent piece
beside him.) "Just arrived?" he asked affably.
Charlie kept gibbering: "Can't eat! Can't eat! My appetite's gone! I
feel stalled before I start. Couldn't touch it. Might have got run
in. Might have got me run in!" and he flared up angry for a moment.
"That's what you might have done to me."
The girl looked at him, pensive, having caught part of this. She moved
nearer to the manager, and they whispered; Charlie eyed them.
"I'm going to slide," he murmured, and half rose off his chair.
The girl and the manager drew apart, and the latter took up the thread
again.
"Just come off a ship?" he enquired.
"Yes, a cattle boat," replied Scholar.
"Don't tell him which one," whispered the Inquisitive One. And then,
next moment: "No, tell him, tell him, because he'll find out, and it'll
make it worse."
Scholar, applying himself to his breakfast, said: "We've just come off
the _Glory_."
"The _Glory_? Oh, that's one of the Saint Lawrence Transport, isn't
it?"
Charlie rose from his chair, and then sat down again. The manager
suddenly dived from behind his counter and ran outside. The
Inquisitive One eyed the door. He wondered if it might not be better
to rush now; but the manager's voice could be heard outside, and then
he dived in again.
"Where's that--oh, yes, here!" and he lifted the fifty-cent piece from
the counter and handed it to a red-faced man who followed him.
"Perhaps it's bad!" moaned Charlie, and again he looked suspiciously at
Scholar.
Relief showed in Charlie's eyes as the red-faced man put the coin in
his pocket, handing the manager some other money in its place.
"Now you can eat your breakfast," said Scholar to Charlie.
"Me? No, can't touch it. Can't eat to-day." The relief was no better
for him than the ordeal, so far as raising an appetite went.
"Your com-ish?" said the manager, smiling to the red-faced man.
"That's all right. You can give me another lump in my tea when I send
over. Good morning."
"Good morning."
The manager came over to give the change himself, to chat about the
weather, and the Atlantic, to ask if there had been any cattle lost
coming over, how many head they had, so on, making pleasant
conversation.
"You don't have an appetite," he said to the Inquisitive One.
"No," Charlie gurgled. And for all the friendly "good morning" of the
manager when they did rise to go, and the friendly nod of the waitress,
great was his relief to be out in the street again. He gave Scholar to
understand that they could congratulate themselves on getting off like
that, that it couldn't happen twice, and as Scholar continued to talk
soothingly, the Inquisitive One became declamatory, and anon
vituperative.
Those of the "Push" that still hung around the Board of Trade doors
saw, on the return of these two, that there had been some friction.
But again the crowd there began to gather and increase, and everybody
had something to say. They hung about for hours; now and then somebody
passed by and cried "Ahoy!" to some member and carried him off for a
drink. At last one of them caught sight of Captain Williamson, with
cheery red face and rolling gait, entering the Board of Trade offices.
Another group of men formed--such another as this from the
_Glory_--"cattle-stiffs." Some sailors hove in sight, in stiff hats
and stiff, and strangely creased, new-brushed shore-going clothes, and
smoked their little short pipes, coming to an anchor near by, and
standing in a circle to talk quietly. But at last Candlass appeared,
hand up and beckoning, and the "Push," subduing its voices, came up to
the swinging glass doors, passed through, some manfully, others with a
look left and right as though on guard lest the place might prove to be
a trap. The big floor space seemed to worry them; it made their foot
steps sound so loud and echoing. The long counter, broad and shiny,
seemed rather magnificent; the windows suggested a church, the wire
netting a cage.
"There's the skipper," said one to another, and they looked through to
where Captain Williamson sat. They were pleased with him for having
won the race with the _Iberian_, _Siberian_, or whatever it might be
called--the rival. They spoke in low voices. Candlass shepherded
them, one at a time, to get their money and sign off. When the Man
with the Hat, who had waited about alone who knows where, appeared
there were glances of hard interest. Safely off the ship somebody had
let out that he had hazed the cook, though everybody thought that the
part of the rumour relating to a revolver was by way of superfluous
frilling to the story. They looked at him with interest, somewhat as
they would look at a boxer if the news passed down the street that he
was coming along, or as they would stand outside the prison where a
murderer awaited execution till the flag went up. One by one they
stepped forward, and Candlass gave them "the wink." They felt
themselves in his hands, as schoolboys with an under-master, when there
has to be an interview with the Head. Soon, however, they got into the
swing and Candlass stood aside. Michael, retiring from the counter
with his hand full of shillings, stepped up to him.
"Will you do something for me, Mr. Candlass?" he said. "Will you keep
half of this for me until we get back to Montreal?" He divided off the
half, but it seemed too much. Present needs were surely greater than
future. "Well, I don't know--perhaps ye might take for me----" he went
on slowly.
"Better let me keep the half, Michael," said Candlass. "You'll only
drink it."
"Indeed you're right," replied Michael. "I'll only drink it."
Cockney stepped up.
"It's a good idear," he said. "Will yer do the sime fer me, please?"
"I will," replied Candlass. "And look here--I want you two to promise
me something." They looked at him. "I want you to promise me that
there'll be no more fighting ashore between you. Let bygones be
bygones."
Cockney made a motion of spitting on his hand and held it out to
Michael, who took it, and looking at Candlass said: "That's a promise,
Mr. Candlass."
"How's the eye?" asked Candlass, and looked, putting a hand on little
Michael's head and raising the blind with a thumb. "It might have been
worse," he said. "It might have been very bad."
"Perhaps we both 'ad a drop," said Cockney.
"Quite so, quite so," agreed Candlass sadly, yet severely.
The youth who had asked for his shaving water for three mornings in
succession got the length of the door, which an official held open;
then he turned round.
"Rafferty!" he called.
Rafferty came back from looking into nothingness with his queer red
eyes, standing apart; and the youth, putting his lips together, made a
sound of contempt with them, and then dived from the place. Rafferty
looked away again; one or two of the men grinned sympathetically; one
or two gave a "Huh!" as who should say: "He _had_ to do something like
that!"
Mike, scratching the side of his head and pushing up his cap, had a
troubled look in his eyes, glanced at the door, said something about
impudence, and then turned to Scholar, who had now taken his money and
received his discharge.
"You're going home then, Scholar?" he said, heavily. "Do you go far?"
"Newcastle."
"Well, well, you'd better not stop here to-night. You'll be coming
back?"
"I'm not sure."
Troubled, Mike looked at him.
"If ye do, Mike can teach ye the ropes. Don't forget. Will ye have a
drink before----"
Scholar looked at the floor, then up at Mike's face.
"It wouldn't just be one, Mike," he said.
The baffled look showed again.
"You're right--another on the top of it, and so on. Men that's friends
will start quarrelling in liquor." Mike looked as if he had much to
say as they drifted towards the door. The tall shepherd from the
boarding house was outside waiting for them. Somebody said: "We're
going to see Frenchy off in the train." Another announced: "Scholar's
taking a train, too." Mike blew a deep breath. He turned round and
looked at them as though they worried him, shaking his head upwards,
and they fell back.
"I'll not be after coming with you," he said. "Them fellers will be
cheerin' and screamin.' We _may_ meet again, or we may _not_. It's
all bloody strange," and he held out his hand. They did not
pump-handle; they grasped hands warmly. Each felt that the other had
much in common with him, but they had need of an interpreter.
"Well, so long, Scholar. Luck with ye, and God bless ye."
"So long, Mike."
THE END
WOODS & SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, LONDON, N.
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