The Red Un's story, like all Gaul, is divided into three parts--his
temptation, his fall and his redemption. All lives are so divided: a
step back; a plunge; and then, in desperation and despair, a little
climb up God's ladder.
Seven days the liner lay in New York--seven days of early autumn
heat, of blistering decks, of drunken and deserting trimmers, of
creaking gear and grime of coal-dust. The cabin which held the Red
Un and the Purser's boy was breathless. On Sunday the four ship's
boys went to Coney Island and lay in the surf half the afternoon.
The bliss of the water on their thin young legs and scrawny bodies
was Heaven. They did not swim; they lay inert, letting the waves
move them about, and out of the depths of a deep content making
caustic comments about the human form as revealed by the relentless
sea.
"That's a pippin!" they would say; or, "My aunt! looks at his legs!"
They voiced their opinions audibly and were ready to back them up
with flight or fight.
It was there that the Red Un saw the little girl. She had come from
a machine, and her mother stood near. She was not a Coney Islander.
She was first-cabin certainly--silk stockings on her thin ankles,
sheer white frock; no jewelry. She took a snapshot of the four
boys--to their discomfiture--and walked away while they were still
writhing.
"That for mine!" said the Red Un in one of his rare enthusiasms.
They had supper--a sandwich and a glass of beer; they would have
preferred pop, but what deep-water man on shore drinks pop?--and
made their way back to the ship by moonlight. The Red Un was terse
in his speech on the car: mostly he ate peanuts abstractedly. If he
evolved any clear idea out of the chaos of his mind it was to wish
she had snapped him in his uniform with the brass buttons.
The heat continued; the men in the stokehole, keeping up only enough
steam for the dynamos and donkey engines, took turns under the
ventilators or crawled up to the boatdeck at dusk, too exhausted to
dress and go ashore. The swimmers were overboard in the cool river
with the first shadows of night; the Quartermaster, so old that he
dyed his hair for fear he'd be superannuated, lowered his lean body
hand over hand down a rope and sat by the hour on a stringpiece of
the dock, with the water laving his hairy and tattooed old breast.
The Red Un was forbidden the river. To be honest, he was rather
relieved--not twice does a man dare the river god, having once been
crowned with his slime and water-weed. When the boy grew very hot
he slipped into a second-cabin shower, and stood for luxurious
minutes with streams running off his nose and the ends of his
fingers and splashing about his bony ankles.
Then, one night, some of the men took as many passengers' lifebelts
and went in. The immediate result was fun combined with safety; the
secondary result was placards over the ship and the dock, forbidding
the use of the ship's lifebelts by the crew.
From that moment the Red Un was possessed for the river and a
lifebelt. So were the other three. The signs were responsible.
Permitted, a ship's lifebelt was a subterfuge of the cowardly,
white-livered skunks who were afraid of a little water; forbidden, a
ship's lifebelt took on the qualities of enemy's property--to be
reconnoitred, assaulted, captured and turned to personal advantage.
That very night, then, four small bodies, each naked save for a
lifebelt, barrelshaped and extending from breast almost to knee,
slipped over the side of the ship with awkward splashes and
proceeded to disport themselves in the river. Scolding tugs sent
waves for them to ride; ferries crawled like gigantic bugs with a
hundred staring eyes. They found the Quartermaster on a stringpiece
immersed to the neck and smoking his pipe, and surrounded him--four
small, shouting imps, floating barrels with splashing hands and
kicking feet.
"Gwan, ye little devils!" said the Quartermaster, clutching the
stringpiece and looking about in the gloom for a weapon. The Red Un,
quite safe and audacious in his cork jacket, turned over on his back
and kicked.
"Gwan yerself, Methuselah!" he sang.
They stole the old man's pipe and passed it from mouth to mouth;
they engaged him in innocent converse while one of them pinched his
bare old toe under water, crab-fashion. And at last they prepared to
shin up the rope again and sleep the sleep of the young, the
innocent and the refreshed.
The Chief was leaning over the rail, just above, smoking!
He leaned against the rail and smoked for three hours! Eight eyes,
watching him from below, failed to find anything in his face but
contemplation; eight hands puckered like a washerwoman's; eight feet
turned from medium to clean, from clean to bleached--and still the
Chief smoked on. He watched the scolding tugs and the ferryboats
that crawled over the top of the water; he stood in rapt
contemplation of the electric signs in Jersey, while the ship's
bells marked the passage of time to eternity, while the
Quartermaster slept in his bed, while the odours of the river stank
in their nostrils and the pressure of the ship's lifebelts weighed
like lead on their clammy bodies.
At eight bells--which is midnight--the Chief emptied his
twenty-fourth pipe over the rail and smiled into the gloom beneath.
"Ye'll better be coming up," he remarked pleasantly. "I'm for
turning in mysel'."
He wandered away; none of the watch was near. The ship was dark,
save for her riding lights. Hand over puckered hand they struggled
up and wriggled out of the belts; stark naked they ducked through
passageways and alleys, and stowed their damp and cringing forms
between sheets.
The Red Un served the Chief's breakfast the next morning very
carefully. The Chief's cantaloupe was iced; his kipper covered with
a hot plate; the morning paper propped against McAndrew's hymn. The
Red Un looked very clean and rather bleached.
The Chief was busy; he read the night reports, which did not amount
to much, the well soundings, and a letter from a man offering to
show him how to increase the efficiency of his engines fifty per
cent, and another offering him a rake-off on a new lubricant.
Outwardly the Chief was calm--even cold. Inwardly he was rather
uncomfortable: he could feel two blue eyes fixed on his back and
remembered the day he had pulled them out of the river, and how
fixed and desperate they were then. But what was it McAndrew said?
"Law, order, duty an' restraint, obedience, discipline!"
Besides, if the boys were going to run off with the belts some
damned first-class passenger was likely to get a cabin minus a belt
and might write to the management. The line had had bad luck; it did
not want another black eye. He cleared his throat; the Red Un
dropped a fork.
"That sort of thing last night won't do, William."
"N-No, sir."
"Ye had seen the signs, of course?"
"Yes, sir." The Red Un never lied to the Chief; it was useless.
The Chief toyed with his kipper.
"Ye'll understand I'd ha' preferred dealin' with the matter mysel';
but it's--gone up higher."
The Quartermaster, of course! The Chief rose and pretended to glance
over the well soundings.
"The four of ye will meet me in the Captain's room in fifteen
minutes," he observed casually.
The Captain was feeding his cat when the Red Un got there. The four
boys lined up uncomfortably; all of them looked clean, subdued,
apprehensive. If they were to be locked up in this sort of weather,
and only three days to sailing time--even a fine would be better.
The Captain stroked the cat and eyed them.
"Well," he said curtly, "what have you four young imps been up to
now?"
The four young imps stood panicky. They looked as innocent as choir
boys. The cat, eating her kipper, wheezed.
"Please, sir," said the Captain's boy solicitously, "Peter has
something in his throat."
"Perhaps it's a ship's lifebelt," said the Captain grimly, and
caught the Chief's eye.
The line palpitated; under cover of its confusion the Chief,
standing in the doorway with folded arms, winked swiftly at the
Captain; the next moment he was more dour than ever.
"You are four upsetters of discipline," said the Captain, suddenly
pounding the table. "You four young monkeys have got the crew by the
ears, and I'm sick of it! Which one of you put the fish in Mrs.
Schmidt's bed?"
Mrs. Schmidt was a stewardess. The Red Un stepped forward.
"Who turned the deckhose into the Purser's cabin night before last?"
"Please," said the Doctor's boy pallidly, "I made a mistake in the
room. I thought----"
"Who," shouted the Captain, banging again, "cut the Quartermaster's
rope two nights ago and left him sitting under the dock for four
hours?"
The Purser's boy this time, white to the lips! Fresh panic seized
them; it could hardly be mere arrest if he knew all this; he might
order them hanged from a yardarm or shot at sunrise. He looked like
the latter. The Red Un glanced at the Chief, who looked apprehensive
also, as if the thing was going too far. The Captain may have read
their thoughts, for he said:
"You're limbs of Satan, all of you, and hanging's too good for you.
What do you say, Chief? How can we make these young scamps lessons
in discipline to the crew?"
Everybody breathed again and looked at the Chief--who stood tall and
sandy and rather young to be a Chief--in the doorway.
"Eh, mon," he said, and smiled, "I'm aye a bit severe. Don't ask me
to punish the bairns."
The Captain sniffed.
"Severe!" he observed. "You Scots are hard in the head, but soft in
the disposition. Come, Chief--shall they walk the plank?"
"Good deescipline," assented the Chief, "but it would leave us a bit
shorthanded."
"True," said the Captain gloomily.
"I was thinkin'," remarked the Chief diffidently--one hates to think
before the Captain; that's always supposed to be his job.
"Yes?"
"That we could make a verra fine example of them and still retain
their services. Ha' ye, by chance, seen a crow hangin' head down in
the field, a warnin' to other mischief-makers?"
"Ou-ay!" said the Captain, who had a Scotch mother. The line wavered
again; the Captain's boy, who pulled his fingers when he was
excited, cracked three knuckles.
"It would be good deescipline," continued the Chief, "to stand the
four o' them in ship's belt at the gangway, say for an hour, morning
and evening--clad, ye ken, as they were during the said
infreengements."
"You're a great man, Chief!" said the Captain. "You hear that,
lads'?"
"With--with no trousers'?" gasped the Doctor's boy.
"If you wore trousers last night. If not----"
* * * * *
The thing was done that morning. Four small boys, clad only in
ship's belts, above which rose four sheepish heads and freckled
faces, below which shifted and wriggled eight bare legs, stood in
line at the gangway and suffered agonies of humiliation at the hands
of crew and dockmen, grinning customs inspectors, coalpassers, and a
newspaper photographer hunting a human-interest bit for a Sunday
paper. The cooks came up from below and peeped out at them; the
ship's cat took up a position in line and came out in the Sunday
edition as "a fellow conspirator."
The Red Un, owing to an early training that had considered clothing
desirable rather than essential, was not vitally concerned. The
Quartermaster had charge of the line; he had drawn a mark with chalk
along the deck, and he kept their toes to it by marching up and down
in front of them with a broomhandle over his shoulder.
"Toe up, you little varmints!" he would snap. "God knows I'd be glad
to get a rap at you--keeping an old man down in the water half the
night! Toe up!"
Whereupon, aiming an unlucky blow at the Purser's boy, he hit the
Captain's cat. The line snickered.
It was just after that the Red Un, surmising a snap by the
photographer on the dock and thwarting it by putting his thumb to
his nose, received the shock of his small life. The little girl from
Coney Island, followed by her mother, was on the pier--was showing
every evidence of coming up the gangway to where he stood. Was
coming! Panic seized the Red Un--panic winged with flight. He
turned--to face the Chief. Appeal sprang to the Red Un's lips.
"Please!" he gasped. "I'm sick, sick as h--, sick as a dog, Chief.
I've got a pain in my chest--I----"
Curiously enough, the Chief did not answer or even hear. He, too,
was looking at the girl on the gangway and at her mother. The next
moment the Chief was in full flight, ignominious flight, his face,
bleached with the heat of the engine room and the stokehole, set as
no emergency of broken shaft or flying gear had ever seen it. Broken
shaft indeed! A man's life may be a broken shaft.
The woman and the girl came up the gangway, exidently to inspect
staterooms. The Quartermaster had rallied the Red Un back to the
line and stood before him, brandishing his broomhandle. Black fury
was in the boy's eye; hate had written herself on his soul. His
Chief had ignored his appeal--had left him to his degradation--had
deserted him.
The girl saw the line, started, blushed, recognised the Red Un--and
laughed!