Harrigan

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.