Twenty minutes later, the last of the fire had been drowned out; the
_Hudson’s_ lines had all been picked up; and the crew sat along the
bulwarks, eating bananas and waiting for the order to start back to
their house. Cripps and Sturton, “Shine” and Farley were perched in
a row along the edge of the engine-room skylight, “in their birthday
clo’s,” each with a banana in his hand and a bulge in his cheek,
fraternizing while they dried.
Sturton was saying, with an air of ownership, “She’s a peach of a
boat, jus’ the same. We c’u’d’ve swamped out that blaze ourselves, if
there hadn’t been a steamer on the island.”
“Shine,” blinking watery-eyed, condemned the fire in resentful
anathemas and bit savagely on the banana. “Damn scorch burned my pipes
so I can’t taste nuthin’,” he complained.
Farley, with the tears still running down his cheeks, swung his heels
blissfully, chewed, and regarded the lights of the city. “It’s hot
work,” he said. “It’s hot work, all right. But how’d yuh like to be
pushin’ a pen in one o’ them little furnaces, fer instance?” He nodded
at the late lights in the upper windows of a distant office building.
“One o’ them newspaper touts was tryin’ to pump me th’other day about
that fire in the cotton. ‘Say,’ he says, ‘what takes you men into the
fire department?’ ‘Oh, the pay,’ I says. ‘The pay.’ ‘Hell!’ he says,
‘the money’s no good to a dead man. Look at Bresnan.’”
“The damn mut!” “Shine” put in. “’T’wasn’t Bresnan’s fault he got
nipped.”
“He didn’t mean it that way,” Cripps said.
“Well, how _did_ he mean it?” “Shine” demanded.
Farley waved his banana skin at the high building. “He meant ’at when
it comes to this sort o’ bus’ness he’d sooner be settin’ up in one o’
them hen-coops peckin’ at an ink bottle an’ scratchin’ at a desk.” He
gave a grotesque imitation of a clerk humped over his work, dipping his
pen frantically, and writing, with his nose to the paper.
Cripps laughed and threw his banana at the pier. “To the woods with
him!” he said. “Gi’me a banana that’s ripe. That last one tasted like a
varnish shop.”
Captain Keighley rose, in his uniform, from the ladder of the engine
room behind them, and caught the general smile. He heard Cripps say,
“This suits me all right.” There were satisfied grunts of assent from
the others. At the stern, Lieutenant Moore sat somewhat apart, spitting
over the rail.
“Get yer clothes on,” Keighley ordered gruffly. “Cast off there, Moore!”
And when the _Hudson_ was spinning back leisurely to her quarters with
a trail of banana skins in her wake, he said to his lieutenant in the
wheel house, “I want yuh to see th’ engineer to-morrah an’ write a
report to headquarters on that low pressure cylinder bus’ness.”
Moore looked up to find the cool grey eyes fixed on him in a
calculation of how much enmity there was left in him. He flushed. “Yes,
sir,” he said, almost gratefully.
Keighley turned away before he added with an effect of kindliness, “All
right. Dady’ll explain about it to yuh to-morrah. Go out an’ tell those
boys we want some bananas in here. I guess we’re smoked as dry as they
are.”
It was not that Keighley felt the impulse of any unguarded generosity.
He knew his fire-department too well for _that_! For there is this
peculiarity in firemen: being free of any business worries or other
anxieties concerning their incomes, they spend their days in efforts
to “get even,” to avenge slights and repay friendships. They are men
of no philosophy, unable to get outside of themselves into any calm
view of their troubles, incapable of forgiving an injury and unable to
understand such a capability in others; and they despise particularly
the “quitter” and the “ingrate.” Keighley did not wish to be sneered
at, by his men, as a “quitter”; and he knew that if Moran did not help
the “Jiggers” in their quarrel with their captain, they would consider
the deputy-chief an “ingrate.” The fight was “to a finish,” whatever
interludes of good-natured fellowship might happen to relieve it.
Keighley knew it. He merely accepted the truce in the spirit of a
“game” antagonist who could fight without malice and win without spite.
He saw the boat berthed, watched the men go off to their beds, and
then turned in himself--relieved to be free of his daily reports--with
a feeling that the truce would last over the next day, at least, which
was Sunday.