They were evidently out of the ordinary sea-lanes, for they sighted only one steamer in ten days, and her they allowed to go by.
"None of us understand proper signalling," said Hughie, "so we can't attract her attention without doing something absurdly theatrical, like running up the ensign upside down; and I'm hanged if we'll do that—yet. After all, we only want to know where we are. We may be just off the coast of Ireland for all I can say, and it does seem feeble to bring a liner out of her course to ask her footling questions. It would be like stopping the Flying Scotsman to get a light for one's pipe."
"Or asking a policeman in Piccadilly Circus the nearest way to the Criterion bar," added Allerton. "I'm with you all the time, captain."
And so these four mendicants allowed a potential Good Samaritan to pass by and sink behind the horizon. It was an action typical of their race: they had no particular objection to death, but they drew the line at being smiled at. Still, there were moments during the next ten days when they rather regretted their diffidence.
But events like these were mere excrescences in a plane of dead monotony. The day's work was made up of endless hours in a Gehenna-like stokehold, where with aching backs and bleeding hands they laboured to feed the insatiable fires, or crawled along tunnel-like bunkers in search of the gradually receding coal; spells at the wheel—sometimes lashed to it—in biting wind or blinding fog; the whole sustained on a diet of ship's biscuit, salt pork, and lukewarm coffee, tempered by brief but merciful intervals of the slumber of utter exhaustion.
Still, one can get used to anything. They even enjoyed themselves after a fashion. High endeavour counts for something, whether you have a wife and family dependent upon you, like Walsh, or can extract la joie de vivre out of an eighteen-hour day and a workhouse diet, like Hughie.
And they got to know each other, thoroughly,—a privilege denied to most in these days of restless activity and multifarious acquaintance.
It was a lasting wonder to Hughie how Allerton could ever have fallen to his present estate; for he displayed an amount of energy, endurance, and initiative during this manhood-testing voyage that was amazing. He himself ascribed his virtue to want of opportunity to practise anything else, but this was obviously too modest an explanation. Perhaps blood always tells. At any rate, Allerton took unquestioned rank as second in command over the heads of two men whose technical knowledge and physical strength far exceeded his own. But in his hours of ease—few enough now—he was as easy-going and flippant and casual as ever.
Walsh in a sense was the weakest of the quartet. He was a capable engineer and an honest man, but he lacked the devil-may-care nonchalance of the other three; for he had a wife and eight children waiting for him in distant Limehouse, and a fact like that gives a man a distaste for adventure. He was a disappointed man, too. He had held a chief engineer's "ticket" for seven years, but he had never held a chief engineer's billet. He could never afford to knock off work and wait until the right berth should come his way: he must always take the first that offered, for fear that the tale of boots and bread in Limehouse should diminish. As a crowning stroke of ill-luck, he had been paid off from his last job because his ship had collided with a New York lighter and been compelled to go into dry dock for three months; and by shipping in the Orinoco he was barely doing more than work his passage home. His ten-year-old dream of delivering Mrs. Walsh from her wash-tub for all time, and exalting her from the res angustæ of Teak Street, Limehouse, to a social environment reserved exclusively for the wives of chief engineers, seemed as far from fulfilment as ever. Still, he maintained a stiff upper lip and kept his watch like a man, which is more than most of us would have done under the circumstances.
But it was Goble who interested Hughie most. In the long night-watches, as they swung the heavy fire-shovels in the stokehold, or heaved the ever-accumulating clinkers over the side, or took turn and turn about to gulp tepid water out of a sooty bucket, or met over a collation of coffee and ship's biscuit—the supper of one and the breakfast of the other—in the galley, Goble would let fall dry pawky reflections on life in general, with autobiographical illustrations, which enabled Hughie to piece together a fairly comprehensive idea of his companion's previous existence.