Author of "The Jungle Book," "Plain Tales from the Hills," etc.
It was her first voyage, and though she was only a little cargo
steamer of two thousand five hundred tons, she was the very best of
her kind, the outcome of forty years of experiments and improvements
in framework and machinery; and her designers and owners thought just
as much of her as though she had been the "Lucania." Any one can make
a floating hotel that will pay her expenses, if he only puts enough
money into the saloon, and charges for private baths, suites of rooms,
and such like; but in these days of competition and low freights every
square inch of a cargo boat must be built for cheapness, great hold
capacity, and a certain steady speed. This boat was perhaps
two hundred and forty feet long and thirty-two feet wide, with
arrangements that enabled her to carry cattle on her main and sheep on
her upper deck if she wanted to; but her great glory was the amount of
cargo that she could store away in her holds. Her owners--they were
a very well-known Scotch family--came round with her from the North,
where she had been launched and christened and fitted, to Liverpool,
where she was to take cargo for New York; and the owner's daughter,
Miss Frazier, went to and fro on the clean decks, admiring the new
paint and the brass-work and the patent winches, and particularly the
strong, straight bow, over which she had cracked a bottle of very
good champagne when she christened the steamer the "Dimbula." It was
a beautiful September afternoon, and the boat in all her newness (she
was painted lead color, with a red funnel) looked very fine indeed.
Her house flag was flying, and her whistle from time to time
acknowledged the salutes of friendly boats, who saw that she was new
to the sea and wished to make her welcome.
"And now," said Miss Frazier, delightedly, to the captain, "she's
a real ship, isn't she? It seems only the other day father gave the
order for her, and now--and now--isn't she a beauty?" The girl was
proud of the firm, and talked as though she were the controlling
partner.
"Oh, she's no so bad," the skipper replied, cautiously. "But I'm
sayin' that it takes more than the christenin' to mak' a ship. In the
nature o' things, Miss Frazier, if ye follow me, she's just irons and
rivets and plates put into the form of a ship. She has to find herself
yet."
"But I thought father said she was exceptionally well found."
"So she is," said the skipper, with a laugh. "But it's this way wi'
ships, Miss Frazier. She's all here, but the parts of her have not
learned to work together yet. They've had no chance."
"But the engines are working beautifully. I can hear them."
"Yes, indeed. But there is more than engines to a ship. Every inch of
her, ye'll understand, has to be livened up, and made to work wi' its
neighbor--sweetenin' her, we call it, technically."
"And how will you do it?" the girl asked.
"We can no more than drive and steer her and so forth; but if we have
rough weather this trip--it's likely--she'll learn the rest by heart!
For a ship, ye'll obsairve, Miss Frazier, is in no sense a reegid
body, closed at both ends. She's a highly complex structure o' various
an' conflictin' strains, wi' tissues that must give an' tak' accordin'
to her personal modulus of eelasteecity." Mr. Buchanan, the chief
engineer, in his blue coat with gilt buttons, was coming toward them.
"I'm sayin' to Miss Frazier, here, that our little 'Dimbula' has to be
sweetened yet, and nothin' but a gale will do it. How's all wi' your
engines, Buck?"
"Well enough--true by plumb an' rule, of course; but there's no
spontaneeity yet." He turned to the girl. "Take my word, Miss
Frazier, and maybe ye'll comprehend later, even after a pretty girl's
christened a ship it does not follow that there's such a thing as a
ship under the men that work her."
"I was sayin' the very same, Mr. Buchanan," the skipper interrupted.
"That's more metaphysical than I can follow," said Miss Frazier,
laughing.
"Why so? Ye're good Scotch, an'--I knew your mother's father; he was
fra' Dumfries--ye've a vested right in metapheesics, Miss Frazier,
just as ye have in the 'Dimbula,'" the engineer said.
"Eh, well, we must go down to the deep watters, an' earn Miss Frazier
her deevidends. Will you not come to my cabin for tea?" said the
skipper. "We'll be in dock the night, and when you're goin' back to
Glasgie ye can think of us loadin' her down an' drivin' her forth--all
for your sake."
In the next four days they stowed nearly four thousand tons dead
weight into the "Dimbula," and took her out from Liverpool. As soon as
she met the lift of the open water she naturally began to talk. If
you put your ear to the side of the cabin the next time you are in a
steamer, you will hear hundreds of little voices in every direction,
thrilling and buzzing, and whispering and popping, and gurgling and
sobbing and squeaking exactly like a telephone in a thunder storm.
Wooden ships shriek and growl and grunt, but iron vessels throb and
quiver through all their hundreds of ribs and thousands of rivets. The
"Dimbula" was very strongly built, and every piece of her had a letter
or a number or both to describe it, and every piece had been hammered
or forged or rolled or punched by man and had lived in the roar and
rattle of the shipyard for months. Therefore, every piece had its own
separate voice in exact proportion to the amount of trouble spent upon
it. Cast iron, as a rule, says very little; but mild steel plates and
wrought iron, and ribs and beams that have been bent and welded and
riveted a good deal, talk continuously. Their conversation, of course,
is not half as wise as human talk, because they are all, though they
do not know it, bound down one to the other in black darkness, where
they cannot tell what is happening near them, nor what is going to
happen next.
A very short while after she had cleared the Irish coast a sullen,
gray-headed old wave of the Atlantic climbed leisurely over her
straight bows, and sat down on the steam capstan, used for hauling
up the anchor. Now, the capstan and the engine that drove it had been
newly painted red and green; besides which, nobody cares for being
ducked.
"Don't you do that again," the capstan sputtered through the teeth of
his cogs. "Hi! Where's the fellow gone?"
The wave had slouched overside with a plop and a chuckle; but "Plenty
more where he came from," said a brother wave, and went through and
over the capstan, who was bolted firmly to an iron plate on the iron
deck beams below.
[Illustration: THE "DIMBULA" TAKING CARGO FOR HER FIRST VOYAGE.]
"Can't you keep still up there," said the deck beams. "What's the
matter with you? One minute you weigh twice as much as you ought to,
and the next you don't."
"It isn't my fault," said the capstan. "There's a green brute from
outside that comes and hits me on the head."
"Tell that to the shipwrights. You've been in position up there for
months, and you've never wriggled like this before. If you aren't
careful you'll strain _us_."
"Talking of strain," said a low, rasping, unpleasant voice, "are any
of you fellows--you deck beams, we mean--aware that those exceedingly
ugly knees of yours happen to be riveted into our structure--_ours_?"
"Who might you be?" the deck beams inquired.
"Oh, nobody in particular," was the answer. "We're only the port and
starboard upper-deck stringers; and, if you persist in heaving and
hiking like this, we shall be reluctantly compelled to take steps."
Now, the stringers of the ship are long iron girders, so to speak,
that run lengthways from stern to bow. They keep the iron frames (what
are called ribs in a wooden ship) in place, and also help to hold
the ends of the deck beams which go from side to side of the ship.
Stringers always consider themselves most important, because they are
so long. In the "Dimbula" there were four stringers on each side--one
far down by the bottom of the hold, called the bilge stringer; one a
little higher up, called the side stringer; one on the floor of the
lower deck; and the upper-deck stringers that have been heard from
already.
"You will take steps, will you?" This was a long, echoing rumble.
It came from the frames; scores and scores of them, each one about
eighteen inches distant from the next, and each riveted to the
stringers in four places. "We think you will have a certain amount of
trouble in _that_;" and thousands and thousands of the little rivets
that held everything together whispered: "You will! You will! Stop
quivering and be quiet. Hold on, brethren! Hold on! Hot punches!
What's that?"
Rivets have no teeth, so they can't chatter with fright; but they did
their best as a fluttering jar swept along the ship from stern to bow,
and she shook like a rat in a terrier's mouth.
An unusually severe pitch, for the sea was rising, had lifted the big
throbbing screw nearly to the surface, and it was spinning round in a
kind of soda water--half sea and half air--going much faster than was
right, because there was no deep water for it to work in. As it sank
again, the engines--and they were triple-expansion, three cylinders in
a row--snorted through all their three pistons: "Was that a joke, you
fellow outside? It's an uncommonly poor one. How are we to do _our_
work if you fly off the handle that way?"
"I didn't fly off the handle," said the screw, twirling huskily at
the end of the screw shaft. "If I had, _you'd_ have been scrap iron
by this time. The sea dropped away from under me, and I had nothing to
catch on to. That's all."
"That's all, d'you call it?" said the thrust-block, whose business it
is to take the push of the screw; for if a screw had nothing to hold
it back it would crawl right into the engine room. (It is the holding
back of the screwing action that gives the drive to a ship.) "I know
I do my work deep down and out of sight, but I warn you I expect
justice. All _I_ ask is justice. Why can't you push steadily and
evenly, instead of whizzing like a whirligig and making me hot under
all my collars?" The thrust-block had six collars, each faced with
brass, and he did not want to get them heated.
All the bearings that supported the fifty feet of screw shaft as it
ran to the stern whispered: "Justice--give us justice."
"I can only give you what I get," the screw answered. "Look out! It's
coming again!"
He rose with a roar as the "Dimbula" plunged; and
"whack--whack--whack--whack" went the engines furiously, for they had
little to check them.
"I'm the noblest outcome of human ingenuity--Mr. Buchanan says so,"
squealed the high-pressure cylinder. "This is simply ridiculous." The
piston went up savagely and choked, for half the steam behind it
was mixed with dirty water. "Help! Oiler! Fitter! Stoker! Help! I'm
choking," it gasped. "Never in the history of maritime invention has
such a calamity overtaken one so young and strong. And if I go, who's
to drive the ship?"
"Hush! oh, hush!" whispered the steam, who, of course, had been to sea
many times before. He used to spend his leisure ashore, in a cloud, or
a gutter, or a flower-pot, or a thunder storm, or anywhere else where
water was needed. "That's only a little priming, as they call it.
It'll happen all night, on and off. I don't say it's nice, but it's
the best we can do under the circumstances."
"What difference can circumstances make? I'm here to do my work--on
clean, dry steam. Blow circumstances!" the cylinder roared.
"The circumstances will attend to the blowing. I've worked on the
North Atlantic run a good many times--it's going to be rough before
morning."
"It isn't distressingly calm now," said the extra strong frames, they
were called web frames, in the engine room. "There's an upward thrust
that we don't understand, and there's a twist that is very bad for our
brackets and diamond plates, and there's a sort of northwestward pull
that follows the twist, which seriously annoys us. We mention this
because _we_ happened to cost a great deal of money, and we feel
sure that the owner would not approve of our being treated in this
frivolous way."
"I'm afraid the matter's out of the owner's hands for the present,"
said the steam, slipping into the condenser. "You're left to your own
devices till the weather betters."
"I wouldn't mind the weather," said a flat bass voice deep below;
"it's this confounded cargo that's breaking my heart. I'm the garboard
strake, and I'm twice as thick as most of the others, and I ought to
know something."
The garboard strake is the very bottom-most plate in the bottom of
a ship, and the "Dimbula's" garboard strake (she was a flat-bottomed
boat) was nearly three-quarters of an inch mild steel.
"The sea pushes me up in a way I should never have expected," the
strake went on, "and the cargo pushes me down, and between the two I
don't know what I'm supposed to do."
"When in doubt, hold on," rumbled the steam, making head in the
boilers.
"Yes, but there's only dark and cold and hurry down here, and how do
I know whether the other plates are doing their duty? Those bulwark
plates up above, I've heard, aren't more than five-sixteenths of an
inch thick--scandalous, I call it."
"I agree with you," said a huge web frame by the main cargo hatch. He
was deeper and thicker than all the others, and curved half-way across
the ship's side in the shape of half an arch, to support the deck
where deck beams would have been in the way of cargo coming up and
down. "I work entirely unsupported, and I observe that I am the
sole strength of this vessel, so far as my vision extends. The
responsibility, I assure you, is enormous. I believe the money value
of the cargo is over one hundred and fifty thousand pounds. Think of
that!"
"And every pound of it dependent on my personal exertions." Here spoke
a sea-valve that communicated directly with the water outside and was
seated not very far from the garboard strake. "I rejoice to think that
I am a Prince-Hyde valve, with best Para rubber facings. Five patents
cover me--I mention this without pride--five separate and several
patents, each one finer than the other. At present I am screwed
fast. Should I open, you would immediately be swamped. This is
incontrovertible!"
Patent things always use the longest words they can. It is a trick
they pick up from their inventors.
"That's news," said a big centrifugal bilge pump. "I had an idea that
you were employed to clean decks and things with. At least, I've used
you for that more than once. I forget the precise number in thousands
of gallons which I am guaranteed to pump in an hour; but I assure you,
my complaining friends, that there is not the least danger. _I_ alone
am capable of clearing any water that may find its way here. By my
biggest delivery, we pitched then!"
The sea was getting up in workmanlike style. It was a dead westerly
gale, blown from under a ragged opening of green sky, narrowed on all
sides by fat gray clouds; and the wind bit like pincers, as it fretted
the spray into lace-work on the heads of the waves.
"I tell you what it is," the foremast telephoned down its wire stays.
"I'm up here, and I can take a dispassionate view of things. There's
an organized conspiracy against us. I'm sure of it, because every
single one of these waves is heading directly for our bows. The whole
sea is concerned in it--and so's the wind. It's awful!"
"What's awful?" said a wave, drowning the capstan for the hundredth
time.
"This organized conspiracy on your part," the capstan gurgled, taking
his cue from the mast.
"Organized bubbles and spindrift! There has been a depression in the
Gulf of Mexico. Excuse me!" He leaped overside; but his friends took
up the tale one after another.
"Which has advanced--" _That_ wave threw green over the funnel.
"As far as Cape Hatteras--" _He_ drenched the bridge.
"And is now going out to sea--to sea--to sea!" _He_ went out in three
surges, making a clean sweep of a boat, which turned bottom up and
sank in the darkening troughs alongside.
"That's all there is to it," seethed the broken water, roaring
through the scuppers. "There's no animus in our proceedings. We're a
meteorological corollary."
"Is it going to get any worse?" said the bow anchor, chained down to
the deck, where he could only breathe once in five minutes.
"Not knowing, can't say. Wind may blow a bit by midnight. Thanks
awfully. Good-by."
The wave that spoke so politely had travelled some distance aft, and
got itself all mixed up on the deck amidships, which was a well deck
sunk between high bulwarks. One of the bulwark plates, which was hung
on hinges to open outward, had swung out, and passed the bulk of the
water back to the sea again with a wop.
"Evidently that's what I'm made for," said the plate, shutting up
again with a sputter of pride. "Oh, no, you don't, my friend!"
The top of a wave was trying to get in from outside, but the plate did
not open in that direction, and the defeated water spurted back.
"Not bad for five-sixteenths of an inch," said the bulwark plate. "My
work, I see, is laid down for the night;" and it began opening and
shutting, as it was designed to do, with the motion of the ship.
"We are not what you might call idle," groaned all the frames
together, as the "Dimbula" climbed a big wave, lay on her side at the
top, and shot into the next hollow, twisting as she descended. A huge
swell pushed up exactly under her middle, and her bow and stern hung
free, with nothing to support them, and then one joking wave caught
her up at the bow, and another at the stern, while the rest of the
water fell away from under her, just to see how she would like it, and
she was held up at the two ends, and the weight of the cargo and the
machinery fell on the groaning iron keels and bilge stringers.
"Ease off! Ease off there!" roared the garboard strake. "I want an
eighth of an inch play. D'you hear me, you young rivets!"
"Ease off! ease off!" cried the bilge stringers. "Don't hold us so
tight to the frames!"
"Ease off!" grunted the deck beams, as the "Dimbula" rolled fearfully.
"You've cramped our knees into the stringers and we can't move. Ease
off, you flat-headed little nuisances."
[Illustration: "AN UNUSUALLY SEVERE PITCH ... HAD LIFTED THE BIG
THROBBING SCREW NEARLY TO THE SURFACE."]
Then two converging seas hit the bows, one on each side, and fell away
in torrents of streaming thunder.
"Ease off!" shouted the forward collision bulkhead. "I want to crumple
up, but I'm stiffened in every direction. Ease off, you dirty little
forge filings. Let me breathe!"
All the hundreds of plates that are riveted on to the frames, and make
the outside skin of every steamer, echoed the call, for each plate
wanted to shift and creep a little, and each plate, according to its
position, complained against the rivets.
"We can't help it! _We_ can't help it!" they murmured. "We're put here
to hold you, and we're going to do it. You never pull us twice in the
same direction. If you'd say what you were going to do next, we'd try
to meet your views."
"As far as I could feel," said the upper-deck planking, and that was
four inches thick, "every single iron near me was pushing or pulling
in opposite directions. Now, what's the sense of that? My friends, let
us all pull together."
"Pull any way you please." roared the funnel, "so long as you don't
try your experiments on _me_. I need fourteen wire ropes, all pulling
in opposite directions, to hold me steady. Isn't that so?"
"We believe you, my boy!" whistled the funnel stays through their
clenched teeth, as they twanged in the wind from the top of the funnel
to the deck.
"Nonsense! We must all pull together," the decks repeated. "Pull
lengthways."
"Very good," said the stringers; "then stop pushing sideways when you
get wet. Be content to run gracefully fore and aft, and curve in at
the ends as we do."
"No, no curves at the end. A very slight workmanlike curve from side
to side, with a good grip at each knee, and little pieces welded on,"
said the deck beams.
"Fiddle!" said the iron pillars of the deep, dark hold. "Who ever
heard of curves? Stand up straight; be a perfectly round column, and
carry tons of good solid weight. Like that! There!" A big sea smashed
on to the deck above, and the pillars stiffened themselves to the
load.
"Straight up and down is not bad," said the frames who run that way
in the sides of the ship, "but you must also expand yourself sideways.
Expansion is the law of life, children. Open out! Open out!"
"Come back!" said the deck beam, savagely, as the upward heave of
the sea made the frames try to open. "Come back to your bearings, you
slack-jawed irons!"
"Rigidity! Rigidity! Rigidity!" thumped the engines. "Absolute,
unvarying rigidity--rigidity!"
"You see!" whined the rivets in chorus. "No two of you will ever pull
alike, and--and you blame it all on us. We only know how to go through
a plate and bite down on both sides so that it can't and mustn't and
sha'n't move."
"I've got one-sixteenth of an inch play at any rate," said the
garboard strake triumphantly; and so he had, and all the bottom of the
ship felt a good deal easier for it.
"Then we're no good," sobbed the bottom rivets. "We were ordered--we
were _ordered_--never to give, and we've given, and the sea will come
in, and we'll all go to the bottom together! First we're blamed for
everything unpleasant, and now we haven't the consolation of having
done our work."
"Don't say I told you," whispered the steam consolingly; "but, between
you and me and the cloud I last came from, it was bound to happen
sooner or later. You _had_ to give a fraction, and you've given
without knowing it. Now hold on, as before."
"What's the use?" a few hundred rivets chattered. "We've given--we've
given; and the sooner we confess that we can't keep the ship together
and go off our little heads, the easier it will be. No rivet forged
could stand this strain."
"No one rivet was ever meant to. Share it among you," the steam
answered.
"The others can have my share. I'm going to pull out," said a rivet in
one of the forward plates.
"If you go, others will follow," hissed the steam. "There's nothing so
contagious in a boat as rivets going. Why, I knew a little chap like
you--he was an eighth of an inch fatter, though--on a steamer--to be
sure, she was only twelve tons, now I come to think of it--in exactly
the same place as you are. _He_ pulled out in a bit of a bobble of a
sea, not half as bad as this, and he started all his friends on the
same butt-strap, and the plate opened like a furnace door, and I had
to climb into the nearest fog bank while the boat went down."
"Now that's peculiarly disgraceful," said the rivet. "Fatter than me,
was he, and in a steamer not half our tonnage? Reedy little peg! I
blush for the family, sir." He settled himself more firmly than ever
in his place, and the steam chuckled.
"You see," he went on quite gravely, "a rivet, and especially a rivet
in _your_ position, is really the _one_ indispensable part of the
ship." The steam did not say that he had whispered the very same thing
to every single piece of iron aboard. There is no sense in telling too
much.
And all that while the little "Dimbula" pitched and chopped and swung
and slewed, and lay down as though she were going to die, and got up
as though she had been stung, and threw her nose round and round in
circles half a dozen times as she dipped, for the gale was at its
worst. It was inky black, in spite of the tearing white froth on the
waves, and, to top everything, the rain began to fall in sheets, so
that you could not see your hand before your face. This did not make
much difference to the iron-work below, but it troubled the foremast a
good deal.
"Now it's all finished," he said, dismally. "The conspiracy is too
strong for us. There is nothing left but to--"
"Hurraar! Brrrraaah! Brrrrrrp!" roared the steam through the foghorn,
till the decks quivered. "Don't be frightened below. It's only me,
just throwing out a few words in case any one happens to be rolling
round to-night,"
"You don't mean to say there's any one except _us_ on the sea in such
weather?" said the funnel, in a husky snuffle.
"Scores of 'em," said the steam, clearing its throat. "Rrrrrraaa!
Brraaaaa! Prrrrp! It's a trifle windy up here; and, great boilers, how
it rains!"
"We're drowning," said the scuppers. They had been doing nothing else
all night, but this steady thresh of rain above them seemed to be the
end of the world.
"That's all right. We'll be easier in an hour or two. First the
wind and then the rain; soon you may make sail again! Grrraaaaah!
Drrrraaaa! Drrrrrp! I have a notion that the sea is going down
already. If it does you'll learn something about rolling. We've only
pitched till now. By the way, aren't you chaps in the hold a little
easier than you were?"
There was just as much groaning and straining as ever, but it was not
so loud or squeaky in tone; and when the ship quivered she did not
jar stiffly, like a poker hit on the floor, but gave a supple little
waggle, like a perfectly balanced golf club.
"We have made a most amazing discovery," said the stringers, one after
another; "a discovery that entirely changes the situation. We have
found, for the first time in the history of shipbuilding, that the
inward pull of the deck beams and the outward thrust of the frames
locks us, as it were, more closely in our places, and enables us to
endure a strain which is entirely without parallel in the records of
marine architecture."
The steam turned a laugh quickly into a roar up the foghorn. "What
massive intellects you great stringers have!" he said, softly, when he
had finished.
"We, also," began the deck beams, "are discoverers and geniuses. We
are of opinion that the support of the hold-pillars materially helps
_us_. We find that we lock upon them when we are subjected to a heavy
and singular weight of sea above."
Here the "Dimbula" shot down a hollow, lying almost on her side, and
righting at the bottom with a wrench and a spasm.
"In these cases--are you aware of this, steam?--the plating at the
bows, and particularly at the stern,--we would also mention the floors
beneath us,--helps _us_ to resist any tendency to spring." It was the
frames who were speaking in the solemn and awed voice which people use
when they have just come across something entirely new for the very
first time.
"I'm only a poor, puffy little flutterer," said the steam, "but I have
to stand a good deal of pressure in my business. It's all tremendously
interesting. Tell us some more. You fellows are _so_ strong."
"You'll see," said the bow plates proudly. "Ready behind there! Here's
the father and mother of waves coming! Sit tight, rivets all!" The
great sluicing comber thundered by, but through all the scuffle and
confusion the steam could hear the low, quick cries of the iron-work
as the various strains took them--cries like these: "Easy now, easy!
_Now_ push for all your strength! Hold out! Give a fraction! Hold up!
Pull in! Shove crossways! Mind the strain at the ends! Grip now! Bite
tight! Let the water get away from under, and there she goes."
The wave raced off into the darkness shouting, "Not bad that, if it's
your first run!" and the drenched and ducked ship throbbed to the beat
of the engines inside her. All three cylinders were wet and white with
the salt spray that had come down through the engine-room hatch; there
was white salt on the canvas-bound steam pipes, and even the bright
work below was speckled and soiled; but the cylinders had learned to
make the most of steam that was half water, and were pounding along
cheerfully.
"How's the noblest outcome of human ingenuity hitting it?" said the
steam, as he whirled through the engine room.
"Nothing for nothing in the world of woe," the cylinders answered,
as if they had been working for centuries, "and precious little for
seventy-five pounds head. We've made two knots this last hour and a
quarter! Rather humiliating for eight hundred horse-power, isn't it?"
"Well, it's better than drifting astern, at any rate. You seem rather
less--how shall I put it?--stiff in the back than you were."
"If you'd been hammered as we've been this night, you wouldn't be
stiff--ffreff--ff--either. Theoreti--retti--retti--cally, of course,
rigidity is _the_ thing. Purr--purr--practically, there has to be a
little give and take. _We_ found that out by working on our sides for
five minutes at a stretch--chch--chh. How's the weather?"
"Sea's going down fast," said the steam.
"Good business," said the high-pressure cylinder. "Whack her up along,
boys. They've given us five pounds more steam;" and he began humming
the first bars of "Said the young Obadiah to the old Obadiah," which,
as you must have noticed, is a pet tune among engines not made for
high speed. Racing liners with twin screws sing "The Turkish Patrol"
and the overture to the "Bronze Horse" and "Madame Angot," till
something goes wrong, and then they give Gounod's "Funeral March of a
Marionette" with variations.
"You'll learn a song of your own some fine day," said the steam, as he
flew up the foghorn for one last bellow.
Next day the sky cleared and the sea dropped a little, and the
"Dimbula" began to roll from side to side till every inch of iron in
her was sick and giddy. But, luckily, they did not all feel ill at the
same time; otherwise she would have opened out like a wet paper box.
The steam whistled warnings as he went about his business, for it is
in this short, quick roll and tumble that follows a heavy sea that
most of the accidents happen; because then everything thinks that the
worst is over and goes off guard. So he orated and chattered till the
beams and frames and floors and stringers and things had learned how
to lock down and lock up on one another, and endure this new kind of
strain.
They had ample time, for they were sixteen days at sea, and it was
foul weather till within a hundred miles of New York. The "Dimbula"
picked up her pilot, and came in covered with salt and red rust. Her
funnel was dirty gray from top to bottom; two boats had been carried
away; three copper ventilators looked like hats after a fight with the
police; the bridge had a dimple in the middle of it; the house that
covered the steam steering-gear was split as with hatchets; there
was a bill for small repairs in the engine room almost as long as the
screw-shaft; the forward cargo hatch fell into bucket staves when
they raised the iron crossbars; and the steam capstan had been badly
wrenched on its bed. Altogether, as the skipper said, it was "a pretty
general average."
"But she's soupled," he said to Mr. Buchanan. "For all her dead
weight, she rode like a yacht. Ye mind that last blow off the Banks? I
was proud of her."
"It's vara good," said the chief engineer, looking along the
dishevelled decks. "Now, a man judging superficially would say we were
a wreck, but we know otherwise--by experience."
Naturally, everything in the "Dimbula" stiffened with pride, and
the foremast and the forward collision bulkhead, who are pushing
creatures, begged the steam to warn the port of New York of their
arrival. "Tell those big boats all about us," they said. "They seem to
take us quite as a matter of course."
It was a glorious, clear, dead calm morning, and in single file, with
less than half a mile between each, their bands playing, and
their tugboats shouting and waving handkerchiefs beneath, were the
"Majestic," the "Paris," the "Touraine," the "Servia," the "Kaiser
Wilhelm II." and the "Werkendam," all statelily going out to sea. As
the "Dimbula" shifted her helm to give the great boats clear way, the
steam (who knows far too much to mind making an exhibition of himself
now and then) shouted:
"Oyez! oyez! oyez! Princes, Dukes, and Barons of the High Seas! Know
ye by these presents we are the 'Dimbula,' fifteen days nine hours out
from Liverpool, having crossed the Atlantic with four thousand ton of
cargo for the first time in our career. We have not foundered! We are
here! Eer! eer! We are not disabled. But we have had a time wholly
unparalleled in the annals of shipbuilding. Our decks were swept. We
pitched, we rolled! We thought we were going to die! Hi! hi! But we
didn't! We wish to give notice that we have come to New York all the
way across the Atlantic, through the worst weather in the world; and
we are the 'Dimbula.' We are--arr--ha--ha--ha-r-r!"
The beautiful line of boats swept by as steadily as the procession of
the seasons. The "Dimbula" heard the "Majestic" say "Humph!" and the
"Paris" grunted "How!" and the "Touraine" said "Oui!" with a little
coquettish flicker of steam; and the "Servia" said "Haw!" and the
"Kaiser" and the "Werkendam" said "Hoch!" Dutch fashion--and that was
absolutely all.
"I did my best," said the steam, gravely, "but I don't think they were
much impressed with us, somehow. Do you?"
"It's simply disgusting," said the bow-plates. "They might have
seen what we've been through. There isn't a ship on the sea that has
suffered as we have--is there now?"
"Well, I wouldn't go so far as that," said the steam, "because I've
worked on some of those boats, and put them through weather quite as
bad as we've had in six days; and some of them are a little over ten
thousand tons, I believe. Now, I've seen the 'Majestic,' for instance,
ducked from her bows to her funnel, and I've helped the 'Arizona,' I
think she was, to back off an iceberg she met with one dark night; and
I had to run out of the 'Paris's' engine room one day because there
was thirty foot of water in it. Of course, I don't deny--" The steam
shut off suddenly as a tugboat, loaded with a political club and a
brass band that had been to see a senator off to Europe, crossed the
bows, going to Hoboken. There was a long silence, that reached without
a break from the cut-water to the propeller blades of the "Dimbula."
Then one big voice said slowly and thickly, as though the owner had
just waked up: "It's my conviction that I have made a fool of myself."
The steam knew what had happened at once; for when a ship finds
herself, all the talking of the separate pieces ceases and melts into
one deep voice, which is the soul of the ship.
"Who are you?" he said, with a laugh.
"I am the 'Dimbula,' of course. I've never been anything else except
that--and a fool."
The tugboat, which was doing its very best to be run down, got away
just in time, and its band was playing clashily and brassily a popular
but impolite air:
In the days of old Rameses--are you on?
In the days of old Rameses--are you on?
In the days of old Rameses,
That story had paresis--
Are you on--are you on--are you on?
"Well, I'm glad you've found yourself," said the steam. "To tell the
truth, I was a little tired of talking to all those ribs of stringers.
Here's quarantine. After that we'll go to our wharf and clean up a
little, and next month we'll do it all over again."