Aston Villa
Celtic
Manchester U,
and so on, which I noticed for myself. The ruling passion–(passion at the referee’s ruling, says the cynic).
I was aware, meanwhile, of vast steel rods and arms in violent motion, named severally by the chief in a mighty voice, which nevertheless was too much of a whisper for me. The gangways round them, it was easier to learn, were narrow and greasy. The cool skill with which an engineer was anointing these whirling forms, his hand dapping mothlike with the tapering can above them, was enough to amaze me. Under a strange construction like a kiln, by way of a low red door, we went into the vault where the dusky, glowing and actually grinning firemen were tending the furnaces. (It happens all day, every day in thousands of ships!) Above, we had looked in at a dark hole–I rightly thought, over the boilers–and breathed for a moment a most parching element, so that the heat of the stokehold did not frighten me. The chief introduced me to the third engineer, Williams–we roared out cordially; and then he inducted me to the mysteries aft, where, along the shaft which revolves the propeller, a specially greasy passage runs. Here, as throughout this cavernous region–I remembered Hedge Street Tunnels, which to the initiated will be a sufficient allusion–might not E. A. Poe, to-day, have set a story to rival the Cask of Amontillado? I suggested it to the chief, but he saw no adventurous, unusual quality in his tunnel. Right aft appeared a long vertical ladder, ascending to a manhole–a safety appliance, he explained it, of the war, but to me it resembled a danger appliance.
Having gone as far as we could, we turned back to the engine-room. I was now accustomed enough to notice that the sultry air of the place was occasionally tempered by a draught of the cooler kind. But I found it hard to realize how man could tolerate surroundings so trying as these in order to earn a wage which in a comfortable employment would be nothing out of the way. I pictured myself as an engineer on a steamer. I feared that, in time, the approach of each watch of four hours down among the machinery, fume, sweat and thunder would become a formidable problem. “Use” no doubt explained the nonchalance of pallid Williams as he groped with his slush-lamp to his work. But I thought of the war, when, after a while, useful “use” began to desert the soldier and to leave him on tenterhooks worse than the apprehensions of the unused.
We were climbing upstairs again–up from the underworld of battle headquarters?
I had appreciated the handful of cotton waste which the chief had given me at the first: and now went off to read poems. The man to whom this “divelish yron yngine”–if I do not misquote Spenser–is given for control (and is controlled), returned to his outstanding labour–that of filing part of a curious patent electric torch which the captain had asked him to restore to life.