With that the poor old chap, who was quite overcome with the exertions he had gone through and his pent-up emotion, broke down utterly, bursting into a regular boohoo.
“Dear me, Mr Stokes; Mr Stokes, don’t give way like that,” said the skipper soothingly, patting him on the back to calm him down, being a very good-hearted man at bottom, in spite of his strict discipline and insistence on being “captain of his own ship,” as he termed it. “Don’t give way like that, old friend! Things will come all right by-and-bye.”
“O-o-h, will they?” snivelled the old chap, refusing to be comforted, like a veritable Rachel mourning for her children. “We may possibly get rid of the water below, but the crosshead bearings are working loose, and I’d like to know who’s going to give me a new gudgeon pin?”
“Hang your gudgeon pin!” cried the skipper irascibly, not perhaps for the moment attaching the importance it demanded to this small but essential part of the engines, uniting the connecting rod of the crank shaft with the piston which he thus irreverently anathematised; and then, struck by the comic aspect of the situation, with the waves breaking over us and the elements in mad turmoil around us, while the fat old chief was blubbering there like a boy about his gudgeon pin as if bewailing some toy that had been taken from him, that he burst out with a roar of laughter, which was so contagious that, in spite of the gloomy outlook and our perilous surroundings, Mr Fosset and all of us on the bridge joined in, even the quartermaster not being able to prevent a grin from stealing over his crusty weatherbeaten face, though the man at the wheel on board ship, when on duty, is technically supposed to be incapable of expressing any emotion beyond such as may be connected with the compass card and the coursing of the ship. “Wha—wha—what’s the matter with that now, old chap? One would think it was a whale and not a gudgeon, you make such a fuss about it.”
Of course the captain’s joke set us all off cackling again; Mr Spokeshave’s “he-he-he” sounding out, high in the treble, above the general cachination.
This exasperated Mr Stokes, making the old fellow quite furious.
“This is no laughing matter, Cap’en Applegarth,” said he with great dignity, standing up as erectly as he could and puffing his corpulent figure out to such an extent that I thought he would burst. “I’ll have ye to know that, sir. Nor did I come on deck, sir, at the peril of my life almost, to be made a jeer block of, though I’m only the chief engineer of the ship and you’re the ca’p’en.”
He spoke with so stately an air that I confess I felt sorry I had given away to any merriment at his expense, while the others grew serious in a moment; and as for Atkins, his whilom grinning face seemed now to be carved out of some species of wood of a particularly hard and fibrous nature.
“Now, don’t get angry, Stokes, old fellow,” cried the skipper shoving out his fist and gripping that of the chief in the very nick of time, for the vessel gave a lurch just then and, still “standing on his dignity,” as the poor old chap was, without holding on to anything, he would have been precipitated over the rail to the deck below, but for the skipper’s friendly aid. “Don’t be angry with me, old chum. I’m sorry I laughed; but you and I have been shipmates too long together for us to fall out now. Why, what the devil has got over you, Stokes? You’ve never been so huffy since I first sailed with you, and I should have thought you one of the last in the world to take offence at a little bit of harmless chaff.”
“Well, well, Cap’en Applegarth, let it bide, let it bide,” replied the old chief, coming round at once, his rage calming down as quickly as it had risen. “I don’t mind your laughing at me if you have a mind too. I daresay it all seemed very funny to you, my being anxious about my engines, but I’m hanged if I can see the fun myself.”