The Day's Work Part 32

"BREAD UPON THE WATERS"

If you remember my improper friend Brugglesmith, you will also bear in mind his friend McPhee, Chief Engineer of the Breslau, whose dingey Brugglesmith tried to steal. His apologies for the performances of Brugglesmith may one day be told in their proper place: the tale before us concerns McPhee. He was never a racing engineer, and took special pride in saying as much before the Liverpool men; but he had a thirty-two years' knowledge of machinery and the humours of s.h.i.+ps.

One side of his face had been wrecked through the bursting of a pressure-gauge in the days when men knew less than they do now, and his nose rose grandly out of the wreck, like a club in a public riot. There were cuts and lumps on his head, and he would guide your forefinger through his short iron-grey hair and tell you how he had come by his trade-marks. He owned all sorts of certificates of extra-competency, and at the bottom of his cabin chest of drawers, where he kept the photograph of his wife, were two or three Royal Humane Society medals for saving lives at sea. Professionally--it was different when crazy steerage-pa.s.sengers jumped overboard--professionally, McPhee does not approve of saving life at sea, and he has often told me that a new h.e.l.l awaits stokers and trimmers who sign for a strong man's pay and fall sick the second day out. He believes in throwing boots at fourth and fifth engineers when they wake him up at night with word that a bearing is redhot, all because a lamp's glare is reflected red from the twirling metal. He believes that there are only two poets in the world; one being Robert Burns, of course, and the other Gerald Ma.s.sey. When he has time for novels he reads Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade chiefly the latter--and knows whole pages of "Very Hard Cash" by heart. In the saloon his table is next to the captain's, and he drinks only water while his engines work.

He was good to me when we first met, because I did not ask questions, and believed in Charles Reade as a most shamefully neglected author.

Later he approved of my writings to the extent of one pamphlet of twenty-four pages that I wrote for Holdock, Steiner & Chase, owners of the line, when they bought some ventilating patent and fitted it to the cabins of the Breslau, Spandau, and Koltzau. The purser of the Breslau recommended me to Holdock's secretary for the job; and Holdock, who is a Wesleyan Methodist, invited me to his house, and gave me dinner with the governess when the others had finished, and placed the plans and specifications in my hand, and I wrote the pamphlet that same afternoon.

It was called "Comfort in the Cabin," and brought me seven pound ten, cash down--an important sum of money in those days; and the governess, who was teaching Master John Holdock his scales, told me that Mrs.

Holdock had told her to keep an eye on me, in case I went away with coats from the hat-rack. McPhee liked that pamphlet enormously, for it was composed in the Bouverie-Byzantine style, with baroque and rococo embellishments; and afterwards he introduced me to Mrs. McPhee, who succeeded Dinah in my heart; for Dinah was half a world away, and it is wholesome and antiseptic to love such a woman as Janet McPhee. They lived in a little twelve-pound house, close to the s.h.i.+pping. When McPhee was away Mrs. McPhee read the Lloyds column in the papers, and called on the wives of senior engineers of equal social standing. Once or twice, too, Mrs. Holdock visited Mrs. McPhee in a brougham with celluloid fittings, and I have reason to believe that, after she had played owner's wife long enough, they talked scandal. The Holdocks lived in an old-fas.h.i.+oned house with a big brick garden not a mile from the McPhees, for they stayed by their money as their money stayed by them; and in summer you met their brougham solemnly junketing by Theydon Bois or Loughton. But I was Mrs. McPhee's friend, for she allowed me to convoy her westward, sometimes, to theatres where she sobbed or laughed or s.h.i.+vered with a simple heart; and she introduced me to a new world of doctors' wives, captains' wives, and engineers' wives, whose whole talk and thought centred in and about s.h.i.+ps and lines of s.h.i.+ps you have never heard of. There were sailing-s.h.i.+ps, with stewards and mahogany and maple saloons, trading to Australia, taking cargoes of consumptives and hopeless drunkards for whom a sea-voyage was recommended; there were frowzy little West African boats, full of rats and c.o.c.kroaches, where men died anywhere but in their bunks; there were Brazilian boats whose cabins could be hired for merchandise, that went out loaded nearly awash; there were Zanzibar and Mauritius steamers and wonderful reconstructed boats that plied to the other tide of Borneo. These were loved and known, for they earned our bread and a little b.u.t.ter, and we despised the big Atlantic boats, and made fun of the P. & O. and Orient liners, and swore by our respective owners--Wesleyan, Baptist, or Presbyterian, as the case might be.

I had only just come back to England when Mrs. McPhee invited me to dinner at three o'clock in the afternoon, and the notepaper was almost bridal in its scented creaminess. When I reached the house I saw that there were new curtains in the window that must have cost forty-five s.h.i.+llings a pair; and as Mrs. McPhee drew me into the little marble-papered hall, she looked at me keenly, and cried:

"Have ye not heard? What d' ye think o' the hatrack?"

Now, that hat-rack was oak-thirty s.h.i.+llings, at least. McPhee came down-stairs with a sober foot--he steps as lightly as a cat, for all his weight, when he is at sea--and shook hands in a new and awful manner--a parody of old Holdock's style when he says good-bye to his skippers. I perceived at once that a legacy had come to him, but I held my peace, though Mrs. McPhee begged me every thirty seconds to eat a great deal and say nothing. It was rather a mad sort of meal, because McPhee and his wife took hold of hands like little children (they always do after voyages), and nodded and winked and choked and gurgled, and hardly ate a mouthful.

A female servant came in and waited; though Mrs. McPhee had told me time and again that she would thank no one to do her housework while she had her health. But this was a servant with a cap, and I saw Mrs. McPhee swell and swell under her garance-coloured gown. There is no small free-board to Janet McPhee, nor is garance any subdued tint; and with all this unexplained pride and glory in the air I felt like watching fireworks without knowing the festival. When the maid had removed the cloth she brought a pineapple that would have cost half a guinea at that season (only McPhee has his own way of getting such things), and a Canton china bowl of dried lichis, and a gla.s.s plate of preserved ginger, and a small jar of sacred and Imperial chow-chow that perfumed the room.

McPhee gets it from a Dutchman in Java, and I think he doctors it with liqueurs. But the crown of the feast was some Madeira of the kind you can only come by if you know the wine and the man. A little maize-wrapped fig of clotted Madeira cigars went with the wine, and the rest was a pale blue smoky silence; Janet, in her splendour, smiling on us two, and patting McPhee's hand.

"We'll drink," said McPhee, slowly, rubbing his chin, "to the eternal d.a.m.nation o' Holdock, Steiner & Chase."

Of course I answered "Amen," though I had made seven pound ten s.h.i.+llings out of the firm. McPhee's enemies were mine, and I was drinking his Madeira.

"Ye've heard nothing?" said Janet. "Not a word, not a whisper?"

"Not a word, nor a whisper. On my word, I have not."

"Tell him, Mac," said she; and that is another proof of Janet's goodness and wifely love. A smaller woman would have babbled first, but Janet is five feet nine in her stockings.

"We're rich," said McPhee. I shook hands all round.

"We're d.a.m.ned rich," he added. I shook hands all round a second time.

"I'll go to sea no more--unless--there's no sayin'--a private yacht, maybe--wi' a small an' handy auxiliary."

"It's not enough for that," said Janet. "We're fair rich--well-to-do, but no more. A new gown for church, and one for the theatre. We'll have it made west."

"How much is it?" I asked.

"Twenty-five thousand pounds." I drew a long breath. "An' I've been earnin' twenty-five an' twenty pound a month!"

The last words came away with a roar, as though the wide world was conspiring to beat him down.

"All this time I'm waiting," I said. "I know nothing since last September. Was it left you?"

They laughed aloud together. "It was left," said McPhee, choking. "Ou, ay, it was left. That's vara good. Of course it was left. Janet, d' ye note that? It was left. Now if you'd put that in your pamphlet it would have been vara jocose. It was left." He slapped his thigh and roared till the wine quivered in the decanter.

The Scotch are a great people, but they are apt to hang over a joke too long, particularly when no one can see the point but themselves.

"When I rewrite my pamphlet I'll put it in, McPhee. Only I must know something more first."

McPhee thought for the length of half a cigar, while Janet caught my eye and led it round the room to one new thing after another--the new vine-pattern carpet, the new chiming rustic clock between the models of the Colombo outrigger-boats, the new inlaid sideboard with a purple cut-gla.s.s flower-stand, the fender of gilt and bra.s.s, and last, the new black-and-gold piano.

"In October o' last year the Board sacked me," began McPhee. "In October o' last year the Breslau came in for winter overhaul. She'd been runnin'

eight months--two hunder an' forty days--an' I was three days makin' up my indents, when she went to dry-dock. All told, mark you, it was this side o' three hunder pound--to be preceese, two hunder an' eighty-six pound four s.h.i.+llings. There's not another man could ha' nursed the Breslau for eight months to that tune. Never again--never again! They may send their boats to the bottom, for aught I care."

"There's no need," said Janet, softly. "We're done wi' Holdock, Steiner & Chase."

"It's irritatin', Janet, it's just irritatin'. I ha' been justified from first to last, as the world knows, but--but I canna forgie 'em. Ay, wisdom is justified o' her children; an' any other man than me wad ha'

made the indent eight hunder. Hay was our skipper--ye'll have met him.

They s.h.i.+fted him to the Torgau, an' bade me wait for the Breslau under young Bannister. Ye'll obsairve there'd been a new election on the Board. I heard the shares were sellin' hither an' yon, an' the major part of the Board was new to me. The old Board would ne'er ha' done it.

They trusted me. But the new Board were all for reorganisation. Young Steiner--Steiner's son--the Jew, was at the bottom of it, an' they did not think it worth their while to send me word. The first I knew--an'

I was Chief Engineer--was the notice of the line's winter sailin's, and the Breslau timed for sixteen days between port an' port! Sixteen days, man! She's a good boat, but eighteen is her summer time, mark you.

Sixteen was sheer flytin', kitin' nonsense, an' so I told young Bannister.

"We've got to make it,' he said. 'Ye should not ha' sent in a three hunder pound indent.'

"Do they look for their boats to be run on air?' I said. 'The Board's daft.'

"'E'en tell 'em so,' he says. 'I'm a married man, an' my fourth's on the ways now, she says.'"

"A boy--wi' red hair," Janet put in. Her own hair is the splendid red-gold that goes with a creamy complexion.

"My word, I was an angry man that day! Forbye I was fond o' the old Breslau, I looked for a little consideration from the Board after twenty years' service. There was Board-meetin' on Wednesday, an' I slept overnight in the engine-room, takin' figures to support my case. Well, I put it fair and square before them all. 'Gentlemen,' I said, 'I've run the Breslau eight seasons, an' I believe there's no fault to find wi' my wark. But if ye haud to this'--I waggled the advertis.e.m.e.nt at 'em--'this that I've never heard of it till I read it at breakfast, I do a.s.sure you on my professional reputation, she can never do it. That is to say, she can for a while, but at a risk no thinkin' man would run.'

"'What the deil d' ye suppose we pa.s.s your indents for?' says old Holdock. 'Man, we're spendin' money like watter.'

"'I'll leave it in the Board's hands,' I said, 'if two hunder an'

eighty-seven pound is anything beyond right and reason for eight months.' I might ha' saved my breath, for the Board was new since the last election, an' there they sat, the d.a.m.ned deevidend-huntin'

s.h.i.+p-chandlers, deaf as the adders o' Scripture.

"'We must keep faith wi' the public,' said young Steiner.

"'Keep faith wi' the Breslau, then,' I said. 'She's served you well, an' your father before you. She'll need her bottom restiffenin', an'

new bed-plates, an' turnin' out the forward boilers, an' re-turnin' all three cylinders, an' refacin' all guides, to begin with. It's a three months' job.'

"'Because one employee is afraid? 'says young Steiner. 'Maybe a piano in the Chief Engineer's cabin would be more to the point.'

"I crushed my cap in my hands, an' thanked G.o.d we'd no bairns an' a bit put by.

"'Understand, gentlemen,' I said. 'If the Breslau is made a sixteen-day boat, ye'll find another engineer.'

"'Bannister makes no objection,' said Holdock.

"'I'm speakin' for myself,' I said. 'Bannister has bairns. 'An' then I lost my temper. 'Ye can run her into h.e.l.l an' out again if ye pay pilotage,' I said, 'but ye run without me.'

"'That's insolence,' said young Steiner.

"'At your pleasure,' I said, turnin' to go.