Then began a life of toil, hardship, and drunkenness that lasted three years:—three years whose seasons were all alike in that heated room down in the bowels of that big ship.
He sailed from country to country; he heard their names, Italian, French, and Spanish, but of them all he saw nothing. The fairer the climes they visited, the hotter was his chamber of torment. When he had emptied his cinders, broken his coal, and filled his furnaces, he slept the sleep of exhaustion and intoxication; for a stoker must drink if he lives. In the darkness of his life there was but one bright spot, his mother. She was like the Madonna in a chapel where all the lights are extinguished save the one that burns before her shrine. Now that he had become a man, much of the mystery of her life had become clear to him. His respect for Charlotte was changed to tender pity, and he loved her as we love those for whom we suffer. Even in his most despairing moments he remembered the end for which he toiled, and a mechanical instinct made him carefully preserve almost every sou of his wages.
Meanwhile, distance and time weakened the intercourse between mother and son. Jack’s letters became more and more rare. Those of Charlotte were frequent, but they spoke of things so foreign to his new life, that he read them only to hear their music, the far off echo of a living tenderness.
Letters from Etiolles told him of D’Argenton; later, some from Paris spoke of their having again taken up their residence there, and of the poet having founded a Review, in consequence of the solicitations of friends. This would be a way of bringing his works prominently before the public, as well as to increase his income. At Havana Jack found a large package addressed to him. It was the first number of the magazine. The stoker mechanically turned its leaves, leaving on them the traces of his blackened fingers; and suddenly, as he saw the well-known names of D’Argenton, Moronval, and Hirsch on the smooth pages, he was seized with wild rage and indignation, and he cried aloud, as he shook his fist impatiently in the air, “Wretches, wretches! what have you made of me?”
This emotion was but brief; day by day his intellect weakened, and, strangely enough, he gained in physical health; he was stronger, and better able to support the fatigues of his daily labor; he seemed hardly to recognize any difference between his days when the ship tossed and groaned, and his nights when he slept a drunken sleep, disturbed only by an occasional nightmare.
Was that frightful shock and crash of the Cydnus one of these dreams? That rushing of water, those cries of frightened women,—was all that a dream? His comrades called him, shook him. “Jack, Jack!” they cried; he staggered out, half naked. The engine-room was already half under water, the compass broken, the fires extinguished. The men ran against each other in the darkness. “What is it?” they cried.
An American ship had run them down. The men struggled up the narrow ladder; at the head stood the chief engineer with a revolver in his hand.
“The first man that attempts to pass me I will shoot! Go to your furnaces! Land is not far off; we shall reach it yet if my orders are obeyed.” Each one turned, with rage and despair in his heart. They charged the furnaces with wet coal, and volumes of gas and smoke poured out; while the water still ascending, in spite of the constant work at the pumps, was as cold as ice. The pumps refuse to work, the furnaces will not burn. The stokers are in water up to their shoulders before the voice of the chief engineer is heard: “Save yourselves, my men, if you can!”
CHAPTER XVIII.
D’ARGENTON’S MAGAZINE.
In a narrow street, quiet and orderly, in one of those houses belonging to the last century, D’Argenton had established himself as editor of the new magazine; while Jack, our friend Jack, was its proprietor. Do not smile: this was really the case; his money had been used to establish it. Charlotte had some little scruple at first in so employing these funds, which she wished to preserve intact for the boy on his attaining his majority; but she yielded to the poet’s persuasions.