The girl's mother said nothing more. The Junior Second led them around, helping a pretty young woman about and explaining to her.
"This," he said, smiling at the girl, "is a pump the men have nicknamed Marguerite, because she takes most of one man's time and is always giving trouble."
The young woman tossed her head.
"Perhaps she would do better if she were left alone," she suggested.
The girl's mother said nothing, but, before she left, she took one long look about the engine room. In some such bedlam of noise and heat he spent his life. She was wrong, of course, to pity him; one need not measure labour by its conditions or by its cost, but by the joy of achievement. The woman saw the engines—sinister, menacing, frightful; the man saw power that answered to his hand—conquest, victory. The beat that was uproar to her ears was as the throbbing of his own heart.
It was after they had gone that the Chief emerged from the forward stokehole where the trouble was. He had not seen her; she would not have known him, probably, had they met face to face. He was quite black and the light of battle gleamed in his eyes.
They fixed the trouble somehow. It was fire in a coalbunker, one of the minor exigencies. Fire requiring air they smothered it one way and another. It did not spread, but it did not quite die. And each day's run was better than the day before.
The weather was good. The steerage, hanging over the bow, saw far below the undercurling spray, white under dark blue—the blue growing paler, paler still, until the white drops burst to the top and danced free in the sun. A Greek, going home to Crete to marry a wife, made all day long tiny boats of coloured paper, weighted with corks, and sailed them down into the sea.
"They shall carry back to America my farewells!" he said, smiling. "This to Pappas, the bootblack, who is my friend. This to a girl back in America, with eyes—behold that darkest blue, my children; so are her eyes! And this black one to my sister, who has lost a child."
The first class watched the spray also—as it rose to the lip of a glass.