The Harbor Part 35

Joe looked at me a moment.

"They'll do so much more than drink," he said. "Come on," he added.

"They're going aboard."

They were forming in a long line now before the third-cla.s.s gang-plank.

As they went up with their packs on their shoulders, a man at the top gave each a shove and shouted out a number, which another official checked off in a book. The latter I learned was the chief engineer. He was a lean, powerful, ruddy-faced man with a plentiful store of profanity which he poured out in a torrent:

"Come on! For Christ's sake! Do you want to freeze solid, you ---- human bunch of stiffs?"

We came up the plank at the end of the line, and I showed him a letter which I had procured admitting us to the engine rooms. He turned us over promptly to one of his junior engineers, and we were soon climbing down oily ladders through the intricate parts of the engines, all polished, glistening, carefully cleaned. And then climbing down more ladders until we were, as I was told, within ten feet of the keel of the s.h.i.+p, we came into the stokers' quarters.

And here nothing at all was carefully cleaned. The place was foul, its painted steel walls and floor and ceiling were heavily encrusted with dirt. The low chamber was crowded with rows of bunks, steel skeleton bunks three tiers high, the top tier just under the ceiling. In each was a thin, dirty mattress and blanket. In some of these men were already asleep, breathing hard, snoring and wheezing. Others were crowded around their bags intent on something I could not see. Many were smoking, the air was blue. Some were almost naked, and the smells of their bodies filled the place. It was already stifling.

"Had enough?" asked our young guide, with a grin.

"No," I said, with an answering superior smile. "We'll stay a while and get it all."

And after a little more talk he left us.

"How do you like our home?" asked Joe.

"I'm here now," I said grimly. "Go ahead and show me. And try to believe that I want to be shown."

"All right, here comes our breakfast."

Two stokers were bringing in a huge boiler. They set it down on the dirty floor. It was full of a greasy, watery soup with a thick, yellow sc.u.m on the top, through which chunks of pork and potato bobbed up here and there.

"This is scouse," Joe told me. Men eagerly dipped tin cups in this and gulped it down. The chunks of meat they ate with their hands. They ate sitting on bunks or standing between them. Some were wedged in close around a bunk in which lay a sleeper who looked utterly dead to the world. His face was white.

"He reminds me," said Joe, "of a fellow whose bunk was once next to mine. He was s.h.i.+pped at Buenos Ayres, where the crimps still handle the business. A crimp had carried this chap on board, dumped him, got his ten dollars and left. The man was supposed to wake up at sea and shovel coal. But this one didn't. The second day out some one leaned over and touched him and yelled. The crimp had sold us a dead one."

As Joe said this he stared down at the sleeper, a curious tensity in his eyes.

"Joe, how did you ever stand this life?"

My own voice almost startled me, it sounded so suddenly tense and strained. Joe turned and looked at me searchingly, with a trace of that old affection of his.

"I didn't, Kid," he said gruffly. "The two years almost got me. And that's what happens to most of 'em here. Half of 'em," he added, "are down-and-outers when they start. They're what the factories and mills and all the rest of this lovely modern industrial world throw out as no more wanted. So they drift down here and take a job that n.o.body else will take, it's so rotten, and here they have one week of h.e.l.l and another week's good drunk in port. And when the barrooms and the women and all the waterfront sharks have stripped 'em of their last red cent, then the crimps collect an advance allotment from their future wages to s.h.i.+p 'em off to sea again."

"That's not true in _this_ port," I retorted, eagerly catching him up on the one point that I knew was wrong. "They don't allow crimps in New York any more."

"No," Joe answered grimly. "The port of New York has got reformed, it's become all for efficiency now. The big companies put up money for a kind of a seamen's Y. M. C. A. where they try to keep men sober ash.o.r.e, and so get 'em back quick into holes like these, in the name of Christ.

"But there's one thing they forget," he added bitterly. "The age of steam has sent the old-style sailors ash.o.r.e and s.h.i.+pped these fellows in their places. And that makes all the difference. These chaps didn't grow up on s.h.i.+ps and get used to being kicked and cowed and shot for mutiny if they struck. No, they're all grown up on land, in factories where they've been in strikes, and they bring their factory views along into these floating factories. And they don't like these stinking holes! They don't like their jobs, with no day and no night, only steel walls and electric light! You hear a shout at midnight and you jump down into the stokehole and work like h.e.l.l till four a. m., when you crawl up all soaked in sweat and fall asleep till the next shout. And you do this, not as the sailor did for a captain he knew and called 'the old man,'

but for a corporation so big it has rules and regulations for you like what they have in the navy. You're nothing but a number. Look here."

He took me to a bulletin that had just been put up on the wall. Around it men were eagerly crowding.

"Here's where you find by your number what s.h.i.+ft you're to work in," he said, "and what other number you have to replace if he goes down. Heart failure is d.a.m.n common here, and if your man gives out it means you double up for the rest of the voyage. So you get his number and hunt for him and size him up. You hope he'll last. I'll show you why."

He crawled down a short ladder and through low pa.s.sageways dripping wet and so came into the stokehole.

This was a long, narrow chamber with a row of glowing furnace doors. Wet coal and coal-dust lay on the floor. At either end a small steel door opened into bunkers that ran along the sides of the s.h.i.+p, deep down near the bottom, containing thousands of tons of soft coal, which the men called "trimmers" kept shoveling out to the stokers. As the voyage went on, Joe told me, these trimmers had to go farther and farther back into the long, black bunkers, full of stifling coal-dust, in which if the s.h.i.+p were rolling the ma.s.ses of coal kept cras.h.i.+ng down. Hundreds of men had been killed that way. In the stokehole the fires were not yet up, but by the time the s.h.i.+p was at sea the furnace mouths would be white hot and the men at work half naked. They not only shoveled coal into the flames, they had to spread it out as well and at intervals rake out the "clinkers" in fiery ma.s.ses on the floor. On these a stream of water played, filling the chamber with clouds of steam. In older s.h.i.+ps, like this one, a "lead stoker" stood at the head of the line and set the pace for the others to follow. He was paid more to keep up the pace. But on the fast new liners this pacer was replaced by a gong.

"And at each stroke of the gong you shovel," said Joe. "You do this till you forget your name. Every time the boat pitches, the floor heaves you forward, the fire spurts at you out of the doors and the gong keeps on like a sledgehammer coming down on top of your mind. And all you think of is your bunk and the time when you're to tumble in."

From the stokers' quarters presently there came a burst of singing.

"Now let's go back," he ended, "and see how they're getting ready for this."

As we crawled back the noise increased, and it swelled to a roar as we entered. The place was pandemonium now. Those groups I had noticed around the bags had been getting out the liquor, and now at eight o'clock in the morning half the crew were already well soused. Some moved restlessly about. One huge bull of a creature with large, limpid, s.h.i.+ning eyes stopped suddenly with a puzzled stare, then leaned back on a bunk and laughed uproariously. From there he lurched over the shoulder of a thin, wiry, sober man who, sitting on the edge of a bunk, was slowly spelling out the words of a newspaper aeroplane story. The big man laughed again and spit, and the thin man jumped half up and snarled.

Louder rose the singing. Half the crew was crowded close around a little red-faced c.o.c.kney. He was the modern "chanty man." With sweat pouring down his cheeks and the muscles of his neck drawn taut, he was jerking out verse after verse about women. He sang to an old "chanty" tune, one that I remembered well. But he was not singing out under the stars, he was screaming at steel walls down here in the bottom of the s.h.i.+p. And although he kept speeding up his song the crowd were too drunk to wait for the chorus, their voices kept tumbling in over his, and soon it was only a frenzy of sound, a roar with yells rising out of it. The singers kept pounding each other's backs or waving bottles over their heads. Two bottles smashed together and brought a still higher burst of glee.

"I'm tired!" Joe shouted. "Let's get out!"

I caught a glimpse of his strained, frowning face. Again it came over me in a flash, the years he had spent in holes like this, in this hideous, rotten world of his, while I had lived joyously in mine. And as though he had read the thought in my disturbed and troubled eyes,

"Let's go up where _you_ belong," he said.

I followed him up and away from his friends. As we climbed ladder after ladder, fainter and fainter on our ears rose that yelling from below.

Suddenly we came out on deck and slammed an iron door behind us.

And I was where I belonged. I was in dazzling suns.h.i.+ne and keen frosty Autumn air. I was among gay throngs of people. Dainty women brushed me by. I felt the softness of their furs, I breathed the fragrant scent of them and of the flowers that they wore, I saw their fresh immaculate clothes, I heard the joyous tumult of their talking and their laughing to the regular crash of the band--all the life of the s.h.i.+p I had known so well.

And I walked through it all as though in a dream. On the dock I watched it spellbound--until with handkerchiefs waving and voices calling down good-bys, that throng of happy travelers moved slowly out into midstream.

And I knew that deep below all this, down in the bottom of the s.h.i.+p, the stokers were still singing.

CHAPTER VI

That same day I had an appointment to lunch with the owner of rich hotels whose story I was writing. And the interview dragged. For the America he knew was like what I'd seen on the upper decks of the s.h.i.+p that had sailed a few hours before. And I could not get back my old zest for it all, I kept thinking of what I had seen underneath. The faces of individual stokers, some fiery red, some sodden gray, kept bobbing up in my memory. Angrily trying to keep them down, I went on with my questions. But I caught the hotel millionaire throwing curious looks at me now and then.

I went home worried and depressed and shut myself up in my workroom.

This business had to be thought out. It wasn't only stokers; it was something deep, world-wide. I had come up against the slums. What had I to do with it all?

I was in my room all afternoon. I heard "the Indian" at my door, but I sat still and silent, and presently he went away.

Late in the twilight Eleanore came. How beautiful she was to-night. She was wearing a soft gown of silk, blue with something white at her throat and a brooch that I had given her. As she bent over my shoulder I felt her clean, fresh loveliness.

"Don't you want to tell me, love, just what it was he showed you?"

"I'd rather not, my dear one, it was something so terribly ugly," I said.