A Man's Man Part 13

"What did you get?" asked Hughie.

"Dollar a night."

"It's not much."

"It's better than starvation," said practical little Mrs. Maclear.

"And what are you going to do next?"

"I'm not going back to old Bercotti's again--that's flat."

"Can you get another berth?"

"Well, if there happens to be anybody in this simple and confiding country who is willing to take on as accompanist or teacher a young woman of shabby-genteel appearance, who is unable to mention a single soul as a reference, and has no character to show from her former employer--it ought to be easy!" said the girl.

Hughie regarded her reflectively.

"You take it well. I admire your pluck," he said.

"A married woman with a husband to keep has no time to worry about pluck," replied Mrs. Maclear; "she just _has_ to do things. Besides, all the pluck in the world can't save a woman when Noddy Kinahan is about.

If it hadn't been for you--by the way, would you mind telling me your name? You know mine."

Hughie told her. Presently they left the trolley-car--_anglice_, electric-tram--and struck off down a street in Brooklyn. The girl turned in at a doorway, and paused at the foot of a stair.

"Won't you come up and see my husband, Mr. Marrable?" she said. "It's ten flights up, and we don't run to an elevator; but I know Dennis would like to thank you himself."

Hughie had intended to refuse,--he hated being thanked as much as most matter-of-fact people,--but, a flash of unusual insight revealing to him the fact that the true object of the invitation was not to exhibit him to the husband, but to enable this proud little lady to exhibit her husband to him, he felt rea.s.sured, and allowed himself to be borne aloft to the Maclear eyrie. Here a gigantic and impulsive son of Kerry, gaunt and hollow-eyed through long bed-keeping, wrung his hand in a manner which made him feel glad he was not a refractory terminal, what time Mrs. Maclear, in a sort of up-to-date version of the song of Miriam, described Hughie's glorious triumph over Noddy Kinahan, laying special stress upon the ecstatic period during which Mr. Kinahan, at the instance of Hughie, had enacted the part of a human pianola.

He left them at last, wondering in his heart, as he tramped home under the stars to his hotel in West Forty-Second Street, what the plucky couple were going to live on during the next two or three months. The man was still practically a cripple,--he must have been badly mangled,--and it is hard work fighting for time in a country whose motto, as regards human as well as other machinery, is: "Never repair!

Sc.r.a.p, and replace!"

Hughie had solved the problem to his satisfaction by the time he crossed Brooklyn Bridge.

For the rest of the way home he thought of other things. A bachelor, however ungregarious, is at heart a sentimental animal, and during his walk Hughie was contemplating with his mind's eye the picture that he had left behind him as he said good-night,--the picture of "a snug little kingdom up ten pair of stairs," tenanted by a little community of two, self-contained and self-sufficient, dauntless in the face of grim want and utter friendlessness,--and, despite his own health and wealth, he experienced a sudden feeling of envy for the crippled and impecunious Dennis Maclear.

"I suppose," he mused to himself, "it doesn't really matter _how_ rotten a time you have in this world so long as you have it in the right company." Then he added, apparently as a sort of corollary: "By gad, when I get home next week, I'll _stay_ there!"

But, however carefully (or carelessly) we handle the tiller on life's voyage, it is the little casual currents and unexpected side winds that really set our course for us. As Hughie rolled into bed that night he reflected, rather regretfully, that the incident of that evening was closed for ever. He had definitely cut himself off from the Maclears, at any rate, for the very simple reason that he had just posted to them a hundred one-dollar notes, as a temporary loan until their "s.h.i.+p came in," carefully omitting to mention that his own was due to go out in twenty-four hours, and giving no address for purposes of repayment.

But for all that, the incident had definitely altered his course for him, or at any rate was destined to send him round by an alternative route.

CHAPTER VII

THE ALTERNATIVE ROUTE

Her most ardent admirers--and they had never been very numerous--could hardly have described the Orinoco as a rapid or up-to-date vessel. She could average a fair eight knots in ordinary weather (except when the Chief Engineer was not sober; and then she had been known to do as much as eleven), and she had faced with tolerable credit seven strenuous years of North Atlantic weather, winter and summer alike. But she was no flier.

She had not always ploughed the ocean at the behests of Mr. Noddy Kinahan, her present owner. As a matter of fact, she dated back to the early sixties. She had been built on the Clyde, in days when people were not in such a hurry as they are now, for steady and reliable cross-channel service between Scotland and Ireland; and the crinolined young lady who had blus.h.i.+ngly performed the christening ceremony as the brand-new steamer slipped down the ways had named her the Gareloch.

After fifteen years of honest buffeting between the Kish and the Cloch the little Gareloch had been p.r.o.nounced too slow, and sold to the proprietor of a line of coasting steamers which plied between Cardiff and London. In this capacity, with a different-coloured funnel and a slightly decayed interior, she had served for nine years as the Annie S.

Holmes. After that an officious gentleman from the Board of Trade happened to notice the state of her boilers, and unhesitatingly declined to renew her certificate until various things were done which her present owner was not in the habit of doing. Consequently she had lain rusting in Southampton Water for six months, until an astute Scot, who ran a sort of Dr. Barnardo's home for steamers which had been abandoned by their original owners, stepped in and bought her, at the rate of about a pound per ton; and having refitted her with some convenient boilers which he had picked up at a sale, and checked her fuel-consumption by reducing her grate-area, set her going again in a humble but remunerative way as a pig-boat between Limerick and Glasgow.

During this period of her career she was known as the Blush Rose--and probably smelt as sweet.

The maritime Dr. Barnardo sold her three years later (at a profit) to a gentleman who required a s.h.i.+p for some shady and mysterious operations amid certain islands in the Southern Pacific. The nature of the poor Blush Rose's occupation may be gathered from the fact that in the s.p.a.ce of three months she made those already tropical regions too hot to hold her; and, with her name painted out, a repaired shot-hole in her counter, and a few pearl oyster-sh.e.l.ls sticking out here and there in the murky recesses of her hold, was knocked down for a song at Buenos Ayres to a Spanish-American who desired her for the fulfilment of some rather private contracts, into which he had entered with a Central American State, for a consignment of small arms and ammunition delivered immediately--terms, C. O. D. and no questions asked. Her captain on this occasion was a Lowland Scot of disreputable character but inherent piety, who endeavoured to confer a rather spurious sanct.i.ty upon a nefarious enterprise by christening his nameless vessel the Jedburgh Abbey. But, alas! the Jedburgh Abbey was confiscated a year later by the United States government, and having disgorged a most uncanonical cargo, was knocked down by Dutch auction, without benefit of clergy, to the highest bidder. Compet.i.tion for her possession was not keen, and she ultimately became the property of Mr. Noddy Kinahan, who at that time was beginning to pile up a considerable fortune by purchasing old steamers on their way to the sc.r.a.p-heap and running them as tramp-freighters until they sank. The Jedburgh Abbey, with a new propeller,--she had gone short of a blade for years,--her rusty carcase tinkered into something like sea-worthiness, and her engines secured a little more firmly to their bed-plates, had re-established her social status by creeping once more into Lloyd's list--the Red Book of the Mercantile Marine--and, disguised as the Orinoco, of the "River" Line of freight-carrying steams.h.i.+ps, had served Mr. Noddy Kinahan well for seven years. This grey morning, with Sandy Hook well down below the western horizon, she clambered wearily but perseveringly over the Atlantic rollers, like a disillusioned and world-weary old cab-horse which, having begun life between the shafts of a gentleman's brougham, is now concluding a depressing existence by dragging a funereal "growler" up and down the undulations of a London suburb.

Her redeeming feature was a certain purity of outline and symmetry of form. She boasted a flush deck, unbroken by any unsightly waist amid-s.h.i.+ps; and not even her unsc.r.a.ped masts, her scarred sides, and her flaked and salt-whitened funnel could altogether take away from her her pride of race,--the right to boast, in common with many a human derelict of the same s.e.x and a very similar history, that she had "been a lady once."

She had now been at sea for well over twenty-four hours, and her crew, who had to a man been brought on board in what a sympathetic eyewitness on a similar occasion once described as "a state of beastly but enviable intoxication," were once more beginning to sit up and take notice. Their efforts in this direction owed much to the kind a.s.sistance of Messrs.

Gates and Dingle, the first and second mates, who with cold douche and unrelenting boot were sparing no pains to rouse to a sense of duty those of their flock who had not yet found or recovered their sea-legs.

The crew consisted of two Englishmen and a Californian, together with a handful of Scandinavians, Portuguese, and Germans, divided by sea-law (which, like its big brother, _non curat de minimis_) into "Dagoes" and "Dutchmen" respectively, representatives of the Romance races being grouped under the former and of the Anglo-Saxon under the latter designations. With one exception none of them had sailed on the s.h.i.+p before, and in all probability would never do so again. They had been purveyed to Captain Kingdom by a Tenderloin boarding-house keeper, and had signed a contract for the voyage to Bordeaux and back, wages for both trips to be paid at the end of the second. If sufficiently knocked about, they would in all probability desert at Bordeaux, preferring to forego their pay rather than stand a second dose of the home comforts of the Orinoco. This was one of the ways in which Captain Kingdom saved his employer money and in which Mr. Noddy Kinahan made the "River" Line a profitable concern. There were also others, which shall be set forth in due course.

Captain Kingdom had just appeared on the bridge. He was a furtive and sinister-looking individual, resembling rather a p.a.w.nbroker's a.s.sistant than one who occupied his business in great waters. But he was a useful servant to Noddy Kinahan.

"Got all the hands to work, Mr. Gates?" he called down to the mate.

"Aye, aye, sir!" replied Mr. Gates, knocking the heel of his boot on the deck to ease his aching toes.

The captain ran his eye over the crew, who were huddling together forward of the bridge. He cleared his throat.

"Now, you sc.u.m," he began genially, "attend to me, while I tell you what you've got to do on board this s.h.i.+p."

The sc.u.m, stagnant and unresponsive, listened stolidly to his harangue, the substance of which did not differ materially, _mutatis mutandis_, from one of Mr. Squeers's inaugural addresses to his pupils on the first morning of term at Dotheboys Hall. Captain Kingdom's peroration laid particular stress upon the fact that Messrs. Gates and Dingle had been requested by him as a particular favour to adopt the policy of the thick stick and the big boot in the case of those members of the crew who refrained from looking slick in executing their orders.

The crew received his remarks with sheepish grins or sullen scowls; and the orator concluded:

"Pick watches, Mr. Gates, and then we'll pipe down to dinner. Are all hands on deck?"

"Aye, aye, sir," replied Mr. Gates, looking over his list.

"I saw _somebody_ down below a few minutes ago," drawled a voice, proceeding from a figure seated upon a bollard.

It was Mr. Allerton, who, with characteristic contentment with (or indifference to) his lot, had performed the unprecedented feat of signing on for a second voyage in the Orinoco. He wore his usual air of humorous tolerance of the cares of this world, and spoke in the composed and unruffled fas.h.i.+on which stamps the high-caste Englishman all over the globe. His lot on board the Orinoco had been lighter than that of most, for his companions, finding him apparently impervious to ill-usage and philosophically genial under all circ.u.mstances, had agreed to regard him as a species of heavily decayed and slightly demented "dude," and had half-affectionately christened him "Percy,"--a term which sums up the typical Englishman for the New Yorker almost as vividly as "Rosbif"

and "G.o.dam" perform that office for the Parisian.

The captain descended from the bridge, walked across the deck, and dispa.s.sionately kicked Mr. Allerton off the bollard.

"Stand up, you swine, when you speak to me!" he shouted. "Where did you see anybody?"

Mr. Allerton rose slowly and painfully from the scuppers. There are moments when the _role_ of a Democritus is difficult to sustain.

"I'm sorry you did that, captain," he remarked, "because I know you didn't mean it personally. You had to make some sort of demonstration, of course, to put the fear of death into these new hands, but I regret that you should have singled me out as the _corpus vile_,--you don't know what that means, I daresay: never mind!--because you have shaken up my wits so much, besides nearly breaking my hip-bone, that I shall have to pause and consider a minute before I remember where I _did_ see the gentleman."

If the captain had been Mr. Gates he would probably have felled Allerton to the deck a second time. As it was, he shuffled his feet uncomfortably and glared. The broken man before him, when all was said and done, was his superior; and the captain, who was of sufficiently refined clay to be sensitive to social distinctions, was angrily conscious of that sense of sheepish uneasiness which obsesses the cad, however exalted, in the presence of a gentleman, however degraded.