Kitabı oku: «Harrigan», sayfa 2

CHAPTER 3

Masters looked at Harrigan, started to laugh, looked again, and then silently held the door open. Harrigan stepped through it and followed to the forecastle, a dingy retreat in the high bow of the ship. He had to bend low to pass through the door, and inside he found that he could not stand erect. It was his first experience of working aboard a ship, and he expected to find a scrupulous neatness, and hammocks in place of beds. Instead he looked on a double row of bunks heaped with swarthy quilts, and the boatswain with a silent gesture indicated that one of these belonged to Harrigan. He went to it without a word and sat down cross-legged to survey his new quarters. It was more like the bunkhouse of a western ranch than anything else he had been in, but all reduced to a miniature, cramped and confined.

Now his eyes grew accustomed to the dim, unpleasant light which came from a single lantern hanging on the central post, and he began to make out the faces of the sailors. An oily-skinned Greek squatted on the bunk to his left. To his right was a Chinaman, marvelously emaciated; his lips pulled back in a continual smile, meaningless, like the grin of a corpse.

Opposite was the inevitable Englishman, slender, good-looking, with pale hair and bright, active eyes. Harrigan had traveled over half the world and never failed to find at least one subject of John Bull in any considerable group of men. This young fellow was talking with a giant Negro, his neighbor. The black man chattered with enthusiasm while the Englishman listened, nodding, intent.

One thing at least was certain about this crew: the Negro, the Chinaman, the Greek, even the Englishman, despite his slender build, they were all hard, strong men.

The cook brought out supper in buckets—stews, chunks of stale bread, tea. As they ate, the sailors grew talkative.

"Slide the slum this way," said the Englishman.

The Negro pushed the bucket across the deck with his foot.

"A hard trip," went on the first speaker.

"All trips on the Mary Rogers is hard," rumbled a voice.

"Aye, but Black McTee is blacker'n ever today."

"He belted the bos'n with a rope end," commented the Negro.

"He ain't human. This is my last trip with him. How about you, John? You got a lump on your jaw yet where he cracked you for breakin' that truck."

This was to the Chinaman, who answered in a soft guttural as if there were bubbling oil in his throat: "Me sail two year Black McTee, an'—"

To finish his speech he passed a tentative hand across his swollen jaw.

"And you'll sail with him till you die, John," said the Englishman. "When a man has had Black McTee for a boss, he'll want no other. He's to other captains what whisky is to beer."

The white teeth of the Negro showed. "Maybe Black McTee won't live long," he suggested.

There was a long silence. It lasted until the supper was finished. It lasted until the men slid into their bunks. And Harrigan knew that every man was repeating slowly to himself: "Maybe Black McTee won't live long."

"Not if this gang goes after him," muttered Harrigan, "and yet—"

He remembered the fight in Ivilei and the heaving shoulders which showed above the heads of the swarming soldiers. With that picture in his mind he went to sleep.

They were far out of sight of land in the morning and loafing south before the trade wind, with a heavy ground swell kicking them along from behind. Harrigan saw the Mary Rogers plainly for the first time. She was small, not more than fifteen hundred or two thousand tons, and the dingiest, sootiest of all tramp freighters. He had little time to make observations.

In the first place all hands washed down the decks, some of the men in rubber boots, the others barefooted, with their trousers rolled up above the knees. Harrigan was one of this number. The cool water from the hose swished pleasantly about his toes. He began to think better of life at sea as the wind blew from his nostrils the musty odors of the forecastle. Then the bos'n, with the suggestion of a grin in his eyes, ordered him up to scrub the bridge. He climbed the steps with a bucket in one hand and a brush in the other. There stood McTee leaning against the wheelhouse and staring straight ahead across the bows. He seemed quite oblivious of his presence until, having finished his job, Harrigan started back down the steps.

"D'you call this clean?" rumbled McTee. "All over again!"

And Harrigan dropped to his knees without protest and commenced scrubbing again. As he worked, he hummed a tune and saw the narrow jaw of McTee jut out. Harrigan smiled.

He had scarcely finished stowing his bucket and brush away when the bos'n brought him word that he was wanted in the fireroom. Masters's face was serious.

"What's the main idea?" asked Harrigan.

The bos'n cast a worried eye fore and aft.

"Black McTee's breakin' you," he said; "you're getting the whip."

"Well?"

"God help you, that's all. Now get below."

There was a certain fervency about this speech which impressed even Harrigan. He brooded over it on his way to the fireroom. There he was set to work passing coal. He had to stand in a narrow passage scarcely wide enough for him to turn about in. On either side was a towering black heap which slanted down to his feet. Midway between the piles was the little door through which he shoveled the coal into the fireroom.

All was stifling hot, with a breath of coal dust and smoke to choke the lungs. Even the Greek firemen sweated and cursed, though they were used to that environment. An ordinary man might have succumbed simply to that fiery, foul atmosphere. It was like a glimpse of hell, dark, hopeless.

It was not the heat or the atmosphere which troubled Harrigan, but his hands. His skin was puffed and soft from the scrubbing of the bridge. Now as he grasped the rough wood of the short-handled scoop the epidermis wore quickly and left his palms half raw. For a time he managed to shift his grip, bringing new portions of his hands to bear on the wood, but even this skin was worn away in time. When he finished his shift, his hands were bleeding in places and raw in the palms.

As he came on deck, he tied them up with bits of soft waste in lieu of a bandage and made no complaint, yet his fingers were trembling when he ate supper that night. He caught the eyes of the rest of the crew studying him with a cold calculation. They were estimating the strength of his endurance and he knew at once that they had been through the same trial one by one until they were broken.

He could see that they hated the captain and he wondered why they would ship with him time and again. He watched their expressions when Black McTee was mentioned, and then he understood. They were waiting for the time when the captain should weaken. Then they would have their revenge.

The second day was a repetition of the first. He began with scrubbing down the bridge. The suds, strong with lye, ate shrewdly at his raw hands. Still he hummed as he worked and watched McTee's frown grow dark. When he was ordered below to the fireroom, he wrapped his hands in the soft waste again. That helped him for a time, but after the first two hours the waste matted and grew hard with perspiration and blood. He had to throw it away and take the shovel handle against his bare skin. He told himself that it was only a matter of time before calluses would form, but what chance was there for a formation of calluses when the water and suds softened his hands every morning?

On the third day he was a little more used to the torture. His hands were hopelessly raw now, but still he made no complaint and stuck with his task. That night he secured a rag and retreated to the stretch of deck between the wheelhouse and the after-cabin, where he squatted beside a bucket of water and washed his hands carefully. Both hands were puffed and red; one of the creases in the left palm bled a steady trickle. He washed them slowly, with infinite relish of the cool water, until he felt that peculiar sensation which warns us that we are watched by another eye.

He looked up to see a young woman standing above him at the rail of the after-cabin. She had been watching him by the light from the window of the wheelhouse.

CHAPTER 4

"Let me bandage your hands," she said. "I have some salve in my room."

Her voice was a balm to the troubled heart of Harrigan. His knotted forehead relaxed.

"Are you coming up?"

"Aye."

He ran up the ladder and followed her to a cabin. She rummaged through a suitcase and finally brought out a little tin box of salve and a roll of gauze. As she stooped with her back to him, he saw that her hair was red—not fiery red like his, but a deep dull bronze, with points of gold where the light struck it. When she straightened and turned, her eyes went wide, looking up to him, for he bulked huge in the tiny cabin.

"What a big fellow you are!"

He did not answer for a moment; he was too busy watching her eyes, which were sea-green, and strangely pleasant and restful.

"Do you know me?" she asked with a slight frown.

"'Scuse me," muttered Harrigan. "I thought at first I did."

He abased his glance while she took one of his hands and turned it palm up.

"Ugh!" she muttered. "How did this happen?"

"Work."

"Do you mean to say they make you work with your hands in this condition?"

"Sure."

"Poor fellow! That black captain!"

Her voice had changed from a peculiarly soft, low accent to a shrill tone that made Harrigan start.

"Poor fellow!" she repeated. "Sit down."

The campstool creaked under the burden of his weight. She pulled up the chair in front of him and placed his left hand on her knees.

"This is peroxide. Tell me if it hurts too much."

She spilled some of the liquid across his palm; it frothed.

"Ouch!" grunted Harrigan involuntarily.

She caught his wrists with both hands.

"Why, your whole arm is trembling! You must be in torture with this.

Have you made any complaint?"

"No."

She studied him for a moment, scenting a mystery somewhere and guessing that he would not speak of it. And she asked no questions. She said not a word and merely bowed her head and started to apply the salve with delicate touches. For the result, a confession of all his troubles tumbled up the big man's throat to his tongue. He had to set his teeth to keep it back.

She became aware of those cold, incurious eyes studying her face as she wrapped the gauze bandage deftly around the injured palms.

"Why do you watch me so closely?"

It disarmed him. Those possibilities of tenderness came about his stiff-set lips, and the girl wondered.

"I was thinkin' about my home town."

"Where is it?"

He frowned and waved his hand in a sweep which included half the points on the compass.

"Back there."

She waited, wrapping up the gauze bandage.

"When I was a kid, I used to go down to the harbor an' watch the ships comin' in an' goin' out," he went on cautiously.

She nodded, and he resumed with more confidence: "I'd sit on the pierhead an' watch the ships. I knew they was bringing the smell of far lands in their holds."

There was a little pause; then his head tilted back and he burst into the soft, thick brogue: "Ah-h, I was afther bein' woild about the schooners blowin' out to sea wid their sails shook out like clouds. An' then I'd look down to the wather around the pier, an' it was green, deep green, ah-h, the deep sea-green av it! An' I would look into it an' dream. Whin I seen your eyes—"

He stopped, grown cold as a man will when he feels that he has laid his inner self indecently bare to the eye of the world. But she did not stir; she did not smile.

"I felt like a kid again," said Harrigan, recovering from the brogue. "Like a kid sittin' on the pierhead an' watchin' the green water. Your eyes are that green," he finished.

Self-consciousness, the very thing which she had been trying to keep the big sailor from, turned her blood to fire. She knew the quick color was running from throat to cheek; she knew the cold, incurious eye would note the change. He was so far aware of the alteration that he rose and glanced at the door.

"Good-by," she said, and then quite forgetting herself: "I shall ask the captain to see that you are treated like a white man."

"You will not!"

"I beg your pardon?" she said, but the hint of insulted dignity was lost on Harrigan.

"You will not," he repeated. "It'd simply make him worse."

She was glad of the chance to be angry; it would explain her heightening color.

"The captain must be an utter brute."

"I figger he's nine tenths man, an' the other tenth devil, but there ain't no human bein' can change any of them ten parts. Good-by. I'm thankin' you. My name's Harrigan."

She opened the door for him.

"If you wish to have that dressing changed, ask for Miss Malone."

"Ah-h!" said Harrigan. "Malone!"

She explained coldly: "I'm Scotch, not Irish."

"Scotch or Irish," said Harrigan, and his head tilted back as it always did when he was excited. "You're afther bein' a real shport, Miss Malone!"

"Miss Malone," she repeated, closing the door after him, and vainly attempting to imitate the thrill which he gave to the word. "What a man!"

She smiled for a moment into space and then pulled the cord for the cabin boy.

CHAPTER 5

The cabin boy did duty for all the dozen passengers, and therefore he was slow in answering. When he appeared, she asked him to carry the captain word that she wished to speak with him. He returned in a short time to say that Captain McTee would talk with her now in his cabin. She followed aft to the captain's room. He did not rise when she entered, but turned in his chair and relinquished a long, black, fragrant cigar.

"Don't stop smoking," she said. "I want you in a pleasant mood to hear what I have to say."

Without reply he placed the cigar in his mouth and the bright black eyes fastened upon her. That suddenly intent regard was startling, as if he had leaned over and spoken a word in her ear. She shrugged her shoulders as if trying to shake off a compelling hand and then settled into a chair.

"I've come to say something that's disagreeable for you to hear and for me to speak."

Still he would not talk. He was as silent as Harrigan. She clenched her hands and drove bravely ahead. She told how she had called the red-headed sailor up to the after-cabin and dressed his hurts, and she described succinctly, but with rising anger the raw and swollen condition of his fingers. The captain listened with apparent enjoyment; she could not tell whether he was relishing her story or his slowly puffed cigar. In the end she waited for his answer, but evidently none was forthcoming.

"Now," she said at last, "I know something about ships and sailors, and I know that if this fellow was to appeal against you after you touch port, a judge would weigh a single word of yours against a whole sentence of Harrigan's. It would be a different matter if a disinterested person pressed a charge of cruelty against you. I am such a person; I would press such a charge; I have the money, the time, and the inclination to do it."

She read the slight hesitation in his manner, not as if he were impressed by what she had to say, but as though he was questioning himself as to whether he should give her any answer at all. It made her wish fervently that she were a man—and a big one. He spoke then, as if an illuminating thought had occurred to him.

"You know Harrigan's record?"

"No," she admitted grudgingly.

McTee sighed as if with deep relief and leaned back in his chair. His smile was sympathetic and it altered his face so marvelously that she caught her breath.

"Of course that explains it, Miss Malone. I don't doubt that he was clever enough to make you think him abused."

"He didn't say a word of accusation against anyone."

"Naturally not. When a man is bad enough to seem honest—"

He drew a long, slow puff on his cigar by way of finishing his sentence and his eyes smiled kindly upon her.

"I knew that he would do his worst to start mutiny among the crew; I didn't think he could get as far as the passengers."

Her confidence was shaken to the ground. Then a new suspicion came to her.

"If he is such a terrible character, why did you let him come aboard your ship?"

Instead of answering, he pulled a cord. The bos'n appeared in a moment.

"Tell this lady how Harrigan came aboard," ordered the captain, and he fastened a keen eye upon the bos'n.

"Made it on the jump while we was pullin' out of dock," said the sailor. "Just managed to get his feet on the gangplank—came within an ace of falling into the sea."

"That's all."

The bos'n retreated and McTee turned back to Kate Malone.

"He had asked me to sign him up for this trip," he explained. "If I'd set him ashore, he'd probably have been in the police court the next morning. So I let him stay. To be perfectly frank with you, I had a vague hope that gratitude might make a decent sailor out of him for a few days. But the very first night he started his work he began to talk discontent among the men in the forecastle, and such fellows are always ready to listen. Of course I could throw Harrigan in irons and feed him on bread and water; my authority is absolute at sea. But I don't want to do that if I can help it. Instead, I have been trying to discipline him with hard work. He knows that he can come to me at any time and speak three words which will release him from his troubles. But he won't say them—yet!"

"Really?" she breathed.

She began to feel deeply honored that such a man as McTee would make so long an explanation to her.

"Shall I call him up here and ask him to say them now?"

"Would you do that? Captain McTee, I'm afraid that I've been very foolish to bother you in this matter, but—"

He silenced her with a wave of the hand, and pulled the cord.

"Bring up Harrigan," he said, when the bos'n appeared again.

"I've considered myself a judge of human nature," she apologized, "but I shall think a long time before I venture another decision."

"You're wrong to feel that way. It would take a shrewd judge to see through Harrigan unless his record were known."

The door opened and the bos'n entered with Harrigan. He fixed his eyes upon the captain without a glance for Kate Malone.

"Harrigan," said McTee, "I've been telling Miss Malone that you can be released from your trouble by saying half a dozen words to me. And you know that you can. You will be treated better than anyone in the crew if you will put your hand in mine and say: 'Captain McTee, I give you my word of honor as a man to do my best to obey orders during the rest of this trip and to hold no malice against you for anything that has happened to me so far.'

"For you see," he explained to the girl, "he probably thinks himself aggrieved by my discipline. Will you say it, Harrigan?"

Instead of answering, the cold eye of Harrigan turned on Kate.

"I told you not to speak to the captain," he said.

"Ah," said McTee, "you were clever enough for that?"

"Do you say nothing, Harrigan?" she said incredulously. "Do you really refuse to speak those words to the captain after he has been generous enough to give you a last chance to make a man of yourself?"

Harrigan turned pale as he glanced at the captain. Her scorn and contempt gave a little metallic ring to her voice.

"You need not be afraid. Captain McTee hasn't told me anything about your record."

Harrigan smiled, but in such a manner that she stepped back. "Easy," said McTee, "you don't need to fear him in here. He knows that I'm his master."

"I'm glad you didn't tell me his record," she answered.

"I can read it in his eyes."

"Lady," said Harrigan, and his head tilted back till the cords stood strongly out at the base of his throat, "I'm afther askin' your pardon for thinkin' ye had ever a dr-rop av hot Irish blood in ye."

"Take him below, bos'n," broke in McTee, "and put him in on the night shift in the fireroom."

No hours of Harrigan's life were bitterer than that night shift. The bandages saved his hands from much of the torture of the shovel handle, but there was deep night in his heart. Early in the morning one of the firemen ran to the chief engineer's room and forced open the door.

"The red-headed man, sir," he stammered breathlessly.

The chief engineer awoke with a snarl. He had drunk much good Scotch whisky that evening, and the smoke of it was still dry in his throat and cloudy in his brain.

"And what the hell is wrong with the red-headed man now?" he roared.

"Ain't he doin' two men's work still?"

"Two? He's doin' ten men's work with his hands rolled in cloth and the blood soakin' through, an' he sings like a devil while he works. He's gone crazy, sir."

"Naw, he ain't," growled the chief; "that'll come later. Black McTee is breakin' him an' he'll be broke before he goes off his nut. Now get to hell out of here. I ain't slept a wink for ten days."

The fireman went back to his work muttering, and Harrigan sang the rest of the night.