IV
"Irons?" The pump-man's head went into the air. For a moment he stood poised on the hatch like a statue. "Irons?" His face paled and hardened and his arms stiffened; but instantaneously, as half a dozen reached out to seize him, he ducked and twisted and side-stepped, and two, who could not be avoided, he knocked swiftly out of his way. He cracked a fist into one face, then the other. There was no malice in it; they simply barred his way to freedom. He leaped from combing to combing of the open hatches. It was thirty feet to the bottom of any one of these empty tanks, and those who followed did so at creeping speed.
He was clear of the mob. A light bound and he was on the ship's rail beside the after-rigging.
The captain, leaning as far out as the chart deck would allow, shook a raging arm at Kieran. "You'll assault, you'll batter my men right and left, will you, you crazy mutineer?"
"Don't call me a mutineer, captain—I've disobeyed no order."
"You are a mutineer. I declare you one now. And you'll go into irons."
"You'll never put me in irons."
"You'll go into irons or you'll go over the side."
"Don't call me a mutineer, captain—I've disobeyed no order"
"Well, maybe I'll go over the side. But before [pg 209] I go, if I have to go, I'll have a word to say. You've been trying to break my nerve from the beginning. I know your kind that bully and starve your crew, and won't have a man on your ship that you can't bully and starve. And so you set your bully bosun to do me—do me to death, if he had to. And when he's not clever enough nor able enough, you'd put me in irons—in irons here on the high seas—out here where no law can get you!"
The first officer was now on the deck beneath the pump-man. "You'd better come down, Kieran. It will be the safest way in the end."
"Mr. Brown, you're a good officer, and I don't want to cross you, but you're not going to put me in irons."
The ship was rolling gently. Kieran rested one hand lightly, by way of balance, on a stay, and kicked his shoes overboard. "A step nearer, Mr. Brown, and I go after the shoes."
"But it's five miles to the Florida shore, Kieran, and alive with sharks. You'd never make it. Come on now."
"No. Five miles or fifty, I'll have a try at it."
Noyes now laid a warning hand on the captain's arm. "Are you going to insist on putting that man in irons?"
"I am. And stand clear of me, you."
"If you try to, he'll jump overboard."
[pg 210]
"And if he does, what of it?"
"If he does, there'll be a bad time ahead for you."
"There will? There's liable to be a bad time for you right now. Do you know you have no rights on this ship unless I say so? Don't you know I can put you in irons, too—that's marine law—if I feel like it?"
"I know what maritime law is. And that's the devil of it when there's a brute on the bridge. You can put me in irons if you want to, but I don't think you will."
"So?" sneered the captain. "I won't? And why not?"
"Because I'm no friendless seafarer. And also because—here's my card. Read it. It's the card of your boss, the man who can hire or fire you, or any other man or officer of this line. And I don't have to give you a reason unless it pleases me. But I'll give a reason at the right time—in your case. And the reason will leave you where you'll never again set foot on the deck of any ship of this line or of a good many other lines."
The captain had set his back to the rail and bared his teeth. Noyes, thinking he was about to spring, braced his feet and waited. Noyes himself was no angelic-looking creature at the moment. His jaw seemed to shoot forward, his eyes to contract and recede.
[pg 211]
"And so that's who you are, is it? And you'd break me?"
"Break you, yes. And perhaps put you in jail before I'm done with you. Now will you put him in irons?"
The captain did not spring. He walked to his room instead. And he gave out no order just then; but soon the mess-boy came out and whispered to the first officer, and the first officer said, "Kieran, you're to return to duty," and pocketed his irons and called off the men.
It was an hour after the fight. Kieran had had time to clean up, and now, with the passenger, he was pacing the long gangway.
"And would you have gone over the side?" the passenger had asked.
"I guess I'd had to, wouldn't I?"
"And would you have reached shore?"
"Why not? Five miles—it's not much in smooth water."
"But the sharks?"
"Sharks? Black boys in West Indian ports will dive all day among them for coppers. Sharks and whales—writers of sea stories certainly ought to pension them. There may have been a shark who once made a meal off a sailor, but let you or me drop over the side, and if there's one anywhere near, he wouldn't stop racing till he was a mile [pg 212] away, and if any harmless slob of a whale ever killed a sailor, be sure he did it through fright. But that's no matter. What does matter, though"—Kieran halted and faced the passenger—"are the men who did go over the side, and not within swimming distance of any pleasant sandy beach either. 'Tisn't every protesting seaman who finds the boss of the line on deck to back him up. And, what's harder, how about the men who never had the choice of going over the side? And think of the poor creatures who got so that in time they didn't even want to go over the side, who might have grown into honest, free men, but who, instead of that, learned only to live for the day when they too would have the power to make their inferiors stand around and cringe and whine."
They paced the length of the deck twice before Kieran spoke again.
"They wonder at the decay of our merchant marine. I wonder did they ever stop to think of what men—seamen—think of the service? In the days of sailing ships a man going to sea met with real danger and hardship, and they developed courage and skill and character of some kind. What training does he get to take the place of that now? He's a hand nowadays, a helper, a lumper—not a sailor—on a great big hulk to which disaster is almost impossible."
"But disasters do happen."
[pg 213]
"They do, but what is the truth about them? Nine out of ten of them have a disgraceful cause. But the public doesn't hear of that, because the public doesn't go to sea—except as a saloon passenger. The public gets its story from the steamship company's office—always, and you know what kind of a story they put out—put out through newspapers that carry their advertising. You know what that chief clerk or that second clerk of yours would tell any inquiring outsider in case of a loss of life on one of these ships. He'd lie and lie and lie and lie and think he was serving a good cause at that, and the papers publishing the lie would think they were serving a good cause, too—especially the constructive organization papers, as they call themselves. Our big steamship officers these days—outside of the navy—don't get the kind of work that keeps men up to the mark, and not getting it they grow soft—their bodies and their souls become flabby. Engineer officers nowadays have the work cut out for them and they are doing good work, but the bridge officers are no longer men of the sea—they're clerks, agents in floating hotels. And the crew take their tone from the officers. When the commander's weak, your whole outfit is apt to weaken, especially under a strain."
They resumed their pacing, Kieran with head high in the air, inhaling deep breaths of the fresh salt air.
[pg 214]
The passenger came out of a deep meditation. "Kieran, you can do a good work for us. Is there any berth with this line you'd like to have? If there is, say so. You can have it. You can have that head clerk's job if you want it. And I think that after a while I could get you mine, for I'm only there to fill a gap."
Kieran shook his head. "It wouldn't do."
"Why not? You're the man for the job."
"No, I'm not the man. You haven't got me quite right. I can point out errors, but I'm not the man to correct them. I'm not a good executive."
"You certainly were the good executive in the bosun's case."
"N-no, no. You mustn't count him. If he was a John L. Sullivan, say, in his good days, it would prove something. Besides, I don't care for fighting—for beating people up. I do hate though to see a bully or a faker getting the best of it, and maybe having had time to knock around and study people, I can pick out a bully or a faker quicker than most people, and seeing somebody getting too much the best of it, why, sometimes I can't help butting in."
"And because of that faculty of seeing things, once you made up your mind to settle down to it, you'd make good on this job I'm offering you."
"No, you've got me wrong again. I'm not a [pg 215] reformer, and never will be, I hope. Reformers, or most that ever I met, are only men who first tried to play politics and got licked at it. I'm only an observer."
"But you like a fight?"
"M-m-m-n not me. And I never did. Any man, of course, likes the excitement once he's into it, but what man enjoys smashing another man in the face? What fights I've been into I couldn't side-step—not without crawling, I mean. No, no, I wouldn't make good on your job. I'd go along all right in your office back in New York for awhile,—for a month, two months, six months,—who knows, maybe a year, and then one day I'd look out the window, take a look down on the Battery, say at the elevated railroad or the Aquarium Building, and the Coney Island steamer dock with the barkers yelling and gesturing, and the loafers on the benches in between, and from that I'd look down the bay and see the Statue of Liberty—some morning that would be, maybe, when the sun was lighting up New York Bay as it does some mornings, or maybe it would be on a late afternoon, with the sun setting over on the Jersey shore, the dark smoke from a hundred chimneys smooching across the pink and purple of it, and, if 'twas summer, a haze like a bridal veil over it all, and between that and the Battery the life of a hundred craft—ferry-boats, [pg 216] tow-boats, lighters, windjammers, steam-yachts, ocean-liners, harbor, coastwise and foreign bound, a hundred different kinds coming and going, the Lord knows where, but to where no four walls will bound 'em for a time, be sure of that. And if ever I did look and looked long enough, be sure the earth would look like it was rolling by too slow and I'd want to get out and give it a push to speed it up. No, no. That"—he looked up at the serene blue—"for my ceiling. And that"—he pointed to the dimpling green sea—"for my office floor. And that"—he waved a hand to space—"for a window. And let all the bruising bosuns and bucko ship's officers afloat jump on me, but give me that and I'll take a chance. And—"
He stopped short and sighed. "I do get going sometimes, don't I?" He looked around the deck. In a bucket of water by the rail the bosun was bathing his battered features. "The bosun reminds me. To-day I promised him I'd finish my Flying Walrus song."
"Go ahead and finish it—that first verse was pretty good."
"The second's better—or I think so. And"—he grinned at the passenger—"I composed it myself, too, to an air running in my head. And I suppose I ought to finish it. And yet"—the bosun was pouring, very quietly, his bucket of wash [pg 217] water into the scuppers—"that would be sort of rubbing it in, wouldn't it?"
"What of it? It will do them all good."
"I don't know about that. If it"—and just then three bells struck, and three bells on the Rapidan meant supper for the watch below.
Kieran left to go to supper, and the passenger noted the deference of the crew toward him. Not one who found himself in his way but hopped swiftly aside to give him gangway.
"How conducive to high judgment, how accelerating to respect is success," mused the passenger. "Two hours ago hardly one of them who did not set him down for a half-crazy, or, at least, an over-sanguine visionary—but now—they bound like stags before him, and none more propitiatingly agile than the former satellites of our deposed bosun. A Don Quixote"—murmured the passenger—"maybe, but a 20th century Don Quixote—with a wallop in each hand. If the Don Quixotes generally had his equipment, it would not be windmills alone which would suffer, and some joy then for honest men to watch the tilting."
[pg 219]