I
The Red Un was very red; even his freckles were red rather than
copper-coloured. And he was more prodigal than most kings, for he
had two crowns on his head. Also his hair grew in varying
directions, like a wheatfields after a storm. He wore a coat without
a tail, but with brass buttons to compensate, and a celluloid collar
with a front attached. It was the Red Un's habit to dress first and
wash after, as saving labour; instead of his neck he washed his
collar.
The Red Un was the Chief Engineer's boy and rather more impressive
than the Chief, who was apt to decry his own greatness. It was the
Red Un's duty to look after the Chief, carry in his meals, make his
bed, run errands, and remind him to get his hair cut now and then.
It was the Red Un's pleasure to assist unassumingly in the
surveillance of that part of the ship where the great god, Steam,
ruled an underworld of trimmers and oilers and stokers and assistant
engineers--and even, with reservations, the Chief. The Red Un kept a
sharp eye on the runs and read the Chief's log daily--so much coal
in the bunkers; so much water in the wells; so many engine-room
miles in twenty-four hours--which, of course, are not sea miles
exactly, there being currents and winds, and God knows what, to
waste steam on.
The Red Un, like the assistants, was becoming a bear on the speed
market. He had learned that, just when the engines get heated enough
to work like demons, and there is a chance to break a record and get
a letter from the management, some current or other will show up--or
a fog, which takes the very tripe out of the cylinders and sends the
bridge yapping for caution.
The Red Un was thirteen; and he made the Chief's bed by pulling the
counterpane neatly and smoothly over the chaos underneath--and got
away with it, the Chief being weary at night. Also, in odd moments
he made life miserable for the crew. Up to shortly before, he had
had to use much energy and all his wits to keep life in his starved
little body; and even keeping an eye on the log and the Chief's
hair, and slipping down into the engine room, where he had no manner
of business, hardly used up his activities. However, he did not lie
and he looked the Chief square in the eye, as man to man.
The Chief had salvaged him out of the Hudson, when what he had taken
for a bobbing red tomato had suddenly revealed a blue face and two
set and desperate eyes. After that the big Scot had forgotten all
about him, except the next day when he put on his shoes, which had
shrunk in the drying. The liner finished coaling about that time,
took on passengers, luggage, steamer baskets and a pilot, and,
having stowed the first two, examined the cards on the third and
dropped the last, was pointed, nose to the east wind, for the race.
The arrow on the twin dials pointed to Stand By! for the long
voyage--three thousand miles or so without a stop. The gong, and
then Half Ahead!--great elbows thrust up and down, up and down; the
grunt of power overcoming inertia, followed by the easy swing of
limitless strength. Full Ahead!--and so off again for the great
struggle--man's wits and the engines and the mercy of God against
the upreaching of the sea.
The Chief, who sometimes dreamed his greatness, but who ignored it
waking, snapped his watch shut.
"Eleven-eleven!" he said to the Senior Second. "Well, here's luck!"
That is what he said aloud; to himself he always said a bit of a
prayer, realising perhaps even more than the bridge how little man's
wits count in the great equation. He generally said something to the
effect that "After all, it's up to Thee, O Lord!"
He shook hands with the Senior Second, which also was his habit; and
he smiled too, but rather grimly. They were playing a bit of a
game, you see; and so far the Chief had won all the tricks--just an
amusing little game and nothing whatever to do with a woman; the
Second was married, but the Chief had put all such things out of his
head years before, when he was a youngster and sailing to the Plate.
Out of his head, quite certainly; but who dreams of greatness for
himself alone? So the Chief, having glanced about and run his hand
caressingly over various fearful and pounding steel creatures, had
climbed up the blistering metal staircase to his room at the top and
was proceeding to put down eleven-eleven and various other things
that the first cabin never even heard of, when he felt that he was
being stared at from behind.
Now and then, after shore leave, a drunken trimmer or stoker gets up
to the Chief's room and has to be subdued by the power of executive
eye or the strength of executive arm. As most Chiefs are Scots, the
eye is generally sufficient. So the Chief, mightily ferocious,
turned about, eye set, as one may say, to annihilate a six-foot
trimmer in filthy overalls and a hangover, and saw--a small
red-haired boy in a Turkish towel.
The boy quailed rather at the eye, but he had the courage of nothing
to lose--not even a pair of breeches--and everything to gain.
"Please," said the apparition, "the pilot's gone, and you can't put
me off!"
The Chief opened his mouth and shut it again. The mouth, and the
modification of an eye set for a six-foot trimmer to an eye for a
four-foot-ten urchin in a Turkish towel, produced a certain
softening. The Red Un, who was like the Chief in that he earned his
way by pitting his wits against relentless Nature, smiled a
little--a surface smile, with fear just behind.
"The Captain's boy's my size; I could wear his clothes," he
suggested.
Now, back in that time when the Chief had kept a woman's picture in
his breast pocket instead of in a drawer of his desk, there had been
small furtive hopes, the pride of the Scot to perpetuate his line,
the desire of a man for a manchild. The Chief had buried all that in
the desk drawer with the picture; but he had gone overboard in his
best uniform to rescue a wharf-rat, and he had felt a curious sense
of comfort when he held the cold little figure in his arms and was
hauled on deck, sputtering dirty river water and broad Scotch, as
was his way when excited.
"And where ha' ye been skulking since yesterday?" he demanded.
"In the bed where I was put till last night. This morning early----"
he hesitated.
"Don't lie! Where were ye?"
"In a passenger's room, under a bed. When the passengers came aboard
I had to get out."
"How did ye get here?"
This met with silence. Quite suddenly the Chief recognised the
connivance of the crew, perhaps, or of a kindly stewardess.
"Who told you this was my cabin?" A smile this time, rather like the
Senior Second's when the Chief and he had shaken hands.
"A nigger!" he said. "A coloured fella in a white suit."
There was not a darky on the boat. The Red Un, whose code was the
truth when possible, but any lie to save a friend--and that's the
code of a gentleman--sat, defiantly hopeful, arranging the towel to
cover as much as possible of his small person.
"You're lying! Do you know what we do with liars on this ship? We
throw them overboard!"
"Then I'm thinking," responded the Turkish towel, "that you'll be
needing another Chief Engineer before long!"
Now, as it happened, the Chief had no boy that trip. The previous
one had been adopted after the last trip by a childless couple who
had liked the shape of his nose and the way his eyelashes curled on
his cheek. The Chief looked at the Red Un; it was perfectly clear
that no one would ever adopt him for the shape of his nose, and he
apparently lacked lashes entirely. He rose and took a bathrobe from
a hook on the door.
"Here," he said; "cover your legs wi' that, and say a prayer if ye'
know wan. The Captain's a verra hard man wi' stowaways."
The Captain, however, who was a gentleman and a navigator and had a
sense of humour also, was not hard with the Red Un. It being
impracticable to take the boy to him, the great man made a special
visit to the boy. The Red Un, in the Chief's bathrobe, sat on a
chair, with his feet about four inches from the floor, and returned
the Captain's glare with wide blue eyes.
"Is there any reason, young man, why I shouldn't order you to the
lockup for the balance of this voyage?" the Captain demanded, extra
grim, and trying not to smile.
"Well," said the Red Un, wiggling his legs nervously, "you'd have to
feed me, wouldn't you? And I might as well work for my keep."
This being a fundamental truth on which most economics and all
governments are founded, and the Captain having a boy of his own at
home, he gave a grudging consent, for the sake of discipline, to the
Red Un's working for his keep as the Chief's boy, and left. Outside
the door he paused.
"The little devil's starved," he said. "Put some meat on those
ribs, Chief, and--be a bit easy with him!"
This last was facetious, the Chief being known to have the heart of
a child.
So the Red Un went on the payroll of the line, and requisition was
made on the storekeeper for the short-tailed coat and the long
trousers, and on the barber for a hair-cut. And in some curious way
the Red Un and the Chief hit it off. It might have been a matter of
red blood or of indomitable spirit.
Spirit enough and to spare had the Red Un. On the trip out he had
licked the Captain's boy and the Purser's boy; on the incoming trip
he had lashed the Doctor's boy to his triumphant mast, and only
three days before he had settled a row in the stokehole by putting
hot ashes down the back of a drunken trimmer, and changing his
attitude from menace with a steel shovel to supplication and prayer.
He had no business in the stokehole, but by that time he knew every
corner of the ship--called the engines by name and the men by
epithets; had named one of the pumps Marguerite, after the Junior
Second's best girl; and had taken violent partisanship in the
eternal rivalry of the liner between the engine room and the bridge.
"Aw, gwan!" he said to the Captain's boy. "Where'd you and your Old
Man be but for us? In a blasted steel tank, floating about on the
bloomin' sea! What's a ship without insides?"
The Captain's boy, who was fourteen, and kept his bath sponge in a
rubber bag, and shaved now and then with the Captain's razor,
retorted in kind.
"You fellows below think you're the whole bally ship!" he said
loftily. "Insides is all right--we need 'em in our business. But
what'd your steel tank do, with the engines goin', if she
wasn't bein' navigated? Steamin' in circles, like a tinklin'
merry-go-round!"
It was some seconds after this that the Purser, a well-intentioned
but interfering gentleman with a beard, received the kick that put
him in dry dock for two days.