A GOOD LINE
Many a true word is spoken in jest--or figure! All war service wings are
not the same.
Atlas was upholding shipping. Atlas was bearing up the country. Atlas
was upholding the world and its blue arch of freedom, just as the fabled
Atlas of old--stalwart sea-god--was supposed to bear heaven and earth
upon his broad shoulders.
That is how the modern Atlas--eighteen-year-old shipyard worker--felt.
It had not been an easy day for Atlas, otherwise, young Atwood Atwell,
Olive's cousin, heir to millions, future prop of a wealthy
banking-house, at present steadying--holding up, rather in imagination
than reality--a raw and ponderous yellow ship's rib, and, according to
his excited feeling, the whole free world with it.
It had been a harder, and in some ways more stirring, day than if he had
been aërially breakfasting on "fish-tails," supping on cloud-puffs,
doing Immelmann turns in the sky, "zooming" upward, or nosing down, to
scan the home-shores through powerful binoculars for tell-tale signs of
spy-work which might frustrate the labors of Atlas and his
fellow-toilers by sooner or later bringing about the sinking of the
vessels they built.
Atlas had seen the scouting air-plane pass over the shipyards, five days
previous, just before sunset, but he had not paid much attention to it.
He was just starting off in his neat little racing-car for a welcome
rush back to the open arms of luxury in and about the paternal summer
residence at Manchester-by-the-Sea.
"By George! I'm beginning to feel sick of the sight of these
dead-an'-alive shipyards," he muttered to himself, throwing a backward
glance, as he drove off, at the yards full of skeleton shapes, like a
scarecrow Armada. "Working on moulding timbers--laying the thin moulds
on the timbers out there in the field beyond the yard, marking those
timbers down to the proper size and beveled shape, using my mathematics
until my head aches--nice pastime when the sun's hot! And, for variety,
steering Blind Tim, that old draft-horse--hitched to one o' those
half-ton timbers when at last it's polished down to a rib--from end to
end o' the yard, between green stock and seasoned stock, an' every other
kind of lumber!" He tooted his horn fiercely, to warn some homing
workman, swerved to avoid another automobile, and so snapped the thread
of meditation.
As he did so, he caught the critical glance of a trio of blue-shirted
ship-carpenters hailing from his own sphere of labor, wending their way
homeward, too; and _almost_ he caught the carping comment of one of
them, Libby Taber--professional shipyard pessimist.
"There! Aw, _there_ goes the 'Candy Kid'!" grunted Libby, and his voice
was flatter than a marsh-fog. "Well, he ain't putting up much of a
front, is he? He's 'soured' on shipyard work already. He'll be knocking
off, some fine day, pretty soon, an' tucking himself away, as a Mamma's
boy, in some soft little 'bunk-fatigue' job--lazy man's job for
war-time.... See if he don't!"
"Well, now, I'm not so sure about that," tempered the foreman. "He
side-tracked the 'bunk-fatigue' jobs when he was drafted for work. An'
if he ain't stuck on the shipyard stunt, he's sticking to it, with
muscle an' nerve--and risks don't faze him; he's as ready to take a
chance as another!"
But despite these sterling qualifications, before the boy reached home
that evening, Libby's marsh-fog mood had, somehow, mysteriously
communicated itself to the young draftee of labor, the wealthy banker's
son, who, until the war summons sounded, had never before done anything
he wasn't particularly interested in doing.
"Oh, confound it all! I do want to knock off. May as well own up to it,"
he acknowledged to himself then, and during the days immediately
following. "How about jumping my job at the end of next week, after I've
given the foreman--he's a fine old fellow--due warning, and--and
slipping into some niche in the bank, or in Uncle Peter's patent
attorney's office, as the Mater wanted me to do? Maybe, after all, I
strained a point, leaving the softer snaps for older men, and starting
in to help build ships, as I'm too young to go across--too young to
enter the Army or Navy, or Aviation either; at least, the family is
against it--Uncle Sam, too, it seems--until I've had another year or two
of college. Well! there's not much sugar in the deal I've chosen....
Pretty raw _deal_ all round! Bah!"
He forged this latter comment, in a moody play upon words, five days
after the scouting war-plane had flown over the shipyards and landed by
a Council Fire, as he pursued the monotonous task of leading the big
blind horse hauling a half-ton of that raw "deal"--unpainted
timber--through the shipyard, amid yellow reefs of the same "ships'
stuff" all about him.
Then, suddenly, under the forenoon sun, Atlas--he had not _yet_ become
Atlas, though, upholding shipping and the world--jumped, caught his
breath, and yanked at Tim's rein--sightless Tim!
A limousine had stopped by the country shipyard--the open, unguarded
shipyard--where vessels were built by the roadside.
A lady stepped out, his mother.
"Don't hurt my boy!" she said to the yard foreman. "Don't work him too
hard. He's beginning to look tired of an evening."
"Well! I guess that won't hurt him any," returned the foreman, smiling,
not unfeelingly. "He's doing his bit, and who--who knows when it may
become the _main bitt_?" perpetrating a whimsical joke as he looked
towards a finished vessel, wedged up on the launching-ways of an
adjoining shipyard, all ready to be launched to-day. "See--see that
sawed-off, drab post rising from her deck, ma'am?" he challenged, being
a man of words, with a voice that habitually hovered about the sky-line,
if Libby's clung to the marshes. "That's one o' the two
bitt-heads--weather main bitt, we call it--to which by'n-by the
main-sheet controlling the mains'l will be belayed--made fast--safety
an' progress both, y' understand!"
The mother stared at him smilingly--began to set him down as a
"character."
"I'd let the boy alone if I were you, lady," went on the yard-boss
earnestly. "If his present 'tough' bit never shows up on deck as the
main bitt on which everything hangs, yet it's that for him now, if the
best in him is anchored to it. Get--me?"
The mother did. She refrained from condoling with her son upon the
sameness of the work in which Blind Tim and he were a team, patted the
sightless horse, which had "pulled himself blind" in the service of a
city fire department, upon the nose, and drove off.
But the boy felt that he had been made an object of solicitude; he
"gloomed" outright and made up his mind, once for all, to "jump his job"
before another ten days were over, in favor of one softer, or swifter,
as the case might be.
"Bah! I could stick it out better in the trenches," he said to himself.
But----
"It's a good line. Hold it--Mike!" challenged the foreman, reading,
perhaps, what was passing in his mind.
Young Crœsus started. It was novel to hear himself addressed as "Mike."
A red glow rose to his neck. He did not resent it. Instead it warmed him
a very little, as if he had stretched just one toe towards a fire--but
not enough to redden the blues.
"'A good line,'" he repeated to himself. "Pshaw! I wonder if that flock
of girls will think so--those who are coming up the river this
afternoon, from that distant beach, to see the launching? At least,
Olive said so in her note. Will leading a blind horse which 'tugged
himself blind' carrying the hook and ladder to city fires--straining
harder than he was driven, as if he knew there were lives in
danger--will that seem a good line to them? Oh, they'll gush over _him_,
of course!... Ha! Here comes another visitor! 'Never rains but it
pours!'" truculently.
Carefully--indeed, tenderly--guiding Tim, duty's blind hero, he had
reached that part of the lumber-littered shipyard where the ponderous
beveled "frame," or yellow ship's rib which the horse was hauling, would
be set up, hoisted by a rude derrick worked by man-power, until it was
in line with sixty-odd of those square frames already branching outward
and upward from the keel of a skeleton vessel propped high upon the
building-stocks.
"Hum-m! 'Some' visitor he seems to be! They're dropping auger, mallet,
and saw to shake hands with him--the ship-carpenters!"
Curiously enough, young Atwood, leaning against his equine hero--a
sturdy, boyish figure, light-haired, ruddy-skinned, as Captain Andy had
described him, in smeared khaki trousers, a white duck shirt, a duck hat
on the back of his head--wanted to do the same, while he waited for the
rib to be set up.
But the visitor did not look at him. He exchanged a few greetings,
hearty, but rather heavy-hearted. In his eye there was a brooding sense
of loss, but a very slight birth-mark beneath it burned like fire--a
flaming star that could not be extinguished.
It magnetized Atwood's gaze, that star; he kept glancing curiously up at
it--it looked so indomitable, burning upon the tall cheek-bone of a
bronzed man who must have measured six feet one even from the red
horizon-line across his tanned forehead to the highly polished toe of
his tan shoe which burrowed speculatively into the matted shavings of
the shipyard.
"I've come to see what vessels you've got on the stocks, that'll be
ready for launching pretty soon," he said, addressing the foreman,
within hearing of Atwood, Blind Tim--who pricked his ears at the lusty
voice--and an interested circle of workmen.
"_What!_ You're not thinking of going out again--so soon, Captain Bob?
Why! It's only two weeks since--since that dandy schooner we built for
you a year ago was sunk by a submarine." The master shipwright gasped.
"Named after your two little boys she was, wasn't she? Sufferin'
catfish! that did make me feel bad; I'm the boy who--built--her."
Captain Bob's tall lip-line quivered, then tightened--flamed like the
birth-star.
"Yes, they sank my savings with her," he admitted. "All I had was in
that vessel! An eight-thousand-dollar fare o' fish, too, that we had
faced dirty weather to get! 'Twill come heavier on the crew, though,
mostly married men with families who'll lose their share, four hundred
dollars each, from the trip. Gosh!"
"You had a hard time trying to make shore, too, when the 'Jerries' let
you get off with your lives--after you saw them whipsaw a bomb under
your schooner, and--and----"
The big captain put out a big hand as if warding off something.
"She crumpled up like a paper bag," he said sorrowfully, "and went
down.... Yes! we had a row of fifty-eight hours in the dories--rough
sea, too, part o' the time--before we sighted land."
"Anything to eat, had you?"
"One bag o' biscuits that the cook grabbed up when we were ordered to
leave her, a gallon of water between sixteen of us, and three parts of a
rhubarb pie that we gave to the--kid."
"Yes, I heard that you had a thirteen-year-old boy--a Boy Scout--with
you."
"So! Son of one of the fishermen--dead game, too!" Captain Bob nodded.
"He was standing at the vessel's rail. I told him to get into the first
dory. Not a bit of it! Not until he was sure his father was safe! When
at last we reached shore a woman asked him if he had 'steered' the dory
at all. He misunderstood her, being weak--having gone fifty hours on
that three-quarters of a rhubarb pie--mean sour it was, too; we hadn't
much sugar aboard! But, Statue o' Liberty! you should have seen him fire
up: 'No!' he yells at her weakly; 'I wasn't _skeered_!'
"True--he wasn't! Kept a scout's mouth on, as they call it, all the
time, corners turning up--an' whistled, curled up in the bow, as long's
a drop of the rhubarb juice held out, to--well, to wet his whistle!"
Eyes were wet now among the ship-carpenters--Atwood's, too! He tickled
Blind Tim's ear and wished that _he_ could muster up enough horse sense
to understand the story.
"Well, the game young one spoke for the rest of you; you're none of you
'skeered o' the subs if you're ready to go out again--looking for
another vessel!"
It was the moved foreman who spoke. Instantly Captain Bob came back to
business, sent his critical gaze roving over the wooden hulls most
nearly finished upon the building-stocks.
"Oh! we're all ready to go to-morrow," he remarked unconcernedly,
chewing his lip, like a cud of courage. "There's a man I know who wants
to buy a fishing-vessel--and he's after me to take her out. He sent me
up here to look 'em over. The 'Jerries' ain't going to keep me ashore."
"I reckon not! You're like the rest o' the skippers, Capt'n Bob--heart
of a bullock, with no back-down to it! The subs couldn't----"
But it was at that very moment--that full and flattering moment--that
the inevitable pessimist spoke up, breaking in upon the foreman's
tribute.
"Aw-w! What's the use?" groaned Libby Taber, in swampy tones--he who had
predicted that the rich boy among them would soon be taking ease in a
"bunk-fatigue job." "_Where's_ the use?... Gloucester's gone up. It's
good-bye--Gloucester! Day, day, Gloucester! We can't build ships faster
than the submarines can sink 'em!"
There was an explosive sound in the yard. Blind Tim--duty's hero--heard
it. The foreman heard it, too, and knew it for what it was--the sob of a
young soul coming into its own!
"'Gloucester gone up!... Good-bye, Gloucester!'" gritted a voice between
clenched teeth. "_Well_--I guess not! 'We can't build ships fast as the
subs can sink them!' ... Well! maybe we can now."
It was the voice of the "Candy Kid"; the voice of a young David crying
aloud in the shipyards against the Philistine menace of his people.
Ship-carpenters stared. Another minute and they might have scoffed at
the stripling--a discouraged stripling, at that--turning spokesman.
But the foreman didn't. He promptly gave a diverting order:
"Frame up!"
Then while workmen proceeded to loop the "falls," hempen ropes, of the
hoisting derrick about the ponderous yellow rib which Tim had hauled
from the shaping sawmill, he muttered to the visitor:
"Go round with you in a minute, Cap'n Bob! Just let's get this half of a
square frame in place first, so's they can bolt her down!
Whoops-ma-daisy! _Up_ she goes!"
Up she went, indeed, the rich boy leaving Tim nosing blindly into the
dry shavings and helping to steady her--the great rib--in the
hoisting-tackle.
"I knew the lad had it in him," was the foreman's silent comment.
"There'll be no more thought of quitting; he'll work overtime now, to
stand back of Cap'n Bob--and his kind--to the last punch in him!...
Steady her there--now!" he cried aloud, as the beveled frame hovered
over the backbone-keel to which it would be bolted, and then settled
down upon it, another rib added to the ship's skeleton. "A mite more to
the right! _Hold_ her now!"
Ship-carpenters did. Two, leaping upon the stocks--the platform of
protruding blocks, arranged cross and criss-cross, on which the skeleton
rested--steadied the rib with their horny hands.
The boy did more--the boy who had cried out against Gloucester "going
up."
Aflame from neck to heel--bareheaded now--he sprang upon the protruding
stocks, too, and, facing the yard, bent his back, his broad, muscular,
young back, under that ponderous frame, so contributing his mite towards
steadying it in place until it could be shored up--propped in its own
place.
And it was then--_then_--to his own excited feeling, not to his
conscious thought--that he became Atlas upholding Gloucester, supporting
shipping--bearing up the World!
A cramped position! Well, presently every bone in him ached, and
swelled, as it seemed, under the heavy pressure, although the half-ton
rib, balanced upon the narrow keel, was still suspended in--supported
by--the derrick's falls.
Water dripped from his disheveled hair--his face--and ran down in
rivulets over his bare, red chest, from which the open shirt-collar--the
limp, soiled shirt-collar--fell back.
But still he crouched--bearing up the World!
Ho! All of a sudden, his bent frame stiffened, reacted to a
lightning-like, cleaving thrill which made him conscious that it was
growing numb.
Two bright eyes were looking audaciously--challengingly--into his. They
were pretty eyes--brown eyes--each harboring a mocking firefly. And the
lashes, half-veiling them, were unusual--dark brown, shading into amber
at the tips, now borrowing the sunshine's gold--mocking gold!
Atlas scowled now as he bore up shipping; his subconscious feeling of
importance--his "it" feeling--was being derided, laughed at, by a girl.
Vaguely, for the blood was congesting in his head, he saw that there
were, at least, a dozen other girlish forms behind her. Girlish faces,
fresh as May-flowers, with a little tan on them, flocked before his
swimming vision.
One swam into sight which he knew. It was lit by dark eyes, with stars
in them.
But, somehow, at the moment, he did not welcome them--their starry
sympathy. He felt, too, hotly provoked with the firefly ones which
challenged him.
"Hul-hullo--Olive!... How d'you do?" he managed to get out, in response
to his cousin's quivering glance.
"Hullo! Atlas.... Atlas holding up the World!" came in laughing
admiration, with swift intuition, from Blue Heron. Her hands were
clasped--her whole slim girlish form a tribute. "My! but his wings have
grown--war-service wings!" The silent homage tickled her throat.
"When--when is the launching to be?" she asked. "When is that new vessel
to be launched over there, in that other yard?"
"About--an hour from now--I--think!" answered Atlas, with difficulty,
from under the yellow ship's rib.