"Then why could n't I put you in a cap and jumper and work you in as one of the greasers?"
"What do you mean by greasers?"
"That's an oiler in the engine-room. It—it may not be the coolest place on earth, in this latitude, but it sure beats the stoke-hole!"
And it was in this way, thirty minutes later, that Blake became a greaser in the engine-room of the Trunella.
Already, far above him, he could hear the rattle and shriek of winch-engines and the far-off muffled roar of the whistle, rumbling its triumph of returning life. Already the great propeller engines themselves had been tested, after their weeks of idleness, languidly stretching and moving like an awakening sleeper, slowly swinging their solemn tons forward through their projected cycles and then as solemnly back again.
About this vast pyramid-shaped machinery, galleried like a Latin house-court, tremulous with the breath of life that sang and hissed through its veins, the new greaser could see his fellow workers with their dripping oil-cans, groping gallery by gallery up towards the square of daylight that sifted down into the oil-scented pit where he stood. He could see his pale-eyed friend, the fourth engineer, spanner in hand, clinging to a moving network of steel like a spider to its tremulous web—and in his breast, for the first time, a latent respect for that youth awakened. He could see other greasers wriggling about between intricate shafts and wheels, crawling cat-like along narrow steel ledges, mounting steep metal ladders guarded by hot hand rails, peering into oil boxes, "worrying" the vacuum pump, squatting and kneeling about iron floors where oil-pits pooled and pump-valves clacked and electric machines whirred and the antiphonal song of the mounting steam roared like music in the ears of the listening Blake, aching as he was for the first relieving throb of the screws. Stolidly and calmly the men about him worked, threatened by flailing steel, hissed at by venomously quiescent powers, beleaguered by mysteriously moving shafts, surrounded by countless valves and an inexplicable tangle of pipes, hemmed in by an incomprehensible labyrinth of copper wires, menaced by the very shimmering joints and rods over which they could run such carelessly affectionate fingers.
Blake could see the assistant engineers, with their eyes on the pointers that stood out against two white dials. He could see the Chief, the Chief whom he would so soon have to buy over and placate, moving about nervous and alert. Then he heard the tinkle of the telegraph bell, and the repeated gasp of energy as the engineers threw the levers. He could hear the vicious hum of the reversing-engines, and then the great muffled cough of power as the ponderous valve-gear was thrown into position and the vaster machinery above him was coerced into a motion that seemed languid yet relentless.
He could see the slow rise and fall of the great cranks. He could hear the renewed signals and bells tinkles, the more insistent clack of pumps, the more resolute rise and fall of the ponderous cranks. And he knew that they were at last under way. He gave no thought to the heat of the oil-dripping pit in which he stood. He was oblivious of the perilous steel that whirred and throbbed about him. He was unconscious of the hot hand rails and the greasy foot-ways and the mingling odor of steam and parching lubricant and ammonia-gas from a leaking "beef engine." He quite forgot the fact that his dungaree jumper was wet with sweat, that his cap was already fouled with oil. All he knew was that he and Binhart were at last under way.
He was filled with a new lightness of spirit as he felt the throb of "full speed ahead" shake the steel hull about which he so contentedly climbed and crawled. He found something fortifying in the thought that this vast hull was swinging out to her appointed sea lanes, that she was now intent on a way from which no caprice could turn her. There seemed something appeasingly ordered and implacable in the mere revolutions of the engines. And as those engines settled down to their labors the intent-eyed men about him fell almost as automatically into the routines of toil as did the steel mechanism itself.
When at the end of the first four-houred watch a gong sounded and the next crew filed cluttering in from the half-lighted between-deck gangways and came sliding down the polished steel stair rails, Blake felt that his greatest danger was over.