The Harbor
BOOK III
CHAPTER V
"Did you see him?" Eleanore asked that night.
"Yes—I saw him——"
I could feel her waiting, but I could not bring myself to talk. Eleanore
wouldn't like J. K. She wouldn't like what I had told him I'd do. I was
sorry now that I had, it was simply looking for trouble. I damned that
challenge in Joe's voice. Why did he always get hold of me so?
"How did he look? Is he much changed?" Eleanore asked me quietly.
"Yes. He looks half sick—and old. He's been through a good deal," I
answered.
"Did he talk about that?"
"Yes"—I hesitated—"and of what he wants to show me," I said. Eleanore
looked quickly up.
"Are you going to see him soon again?"
"Yes—to-morrow morning—to have a look at his stoker friends. I want to
have just one good look at the life that has made him what he is. That's
all—that's all it amounts to——"
There was another silence. Then she came over behind my chair and I felt
the cool quiet of her hand as she slowly stroked my forehead.
"You look tired, dear," she said.
Just before daylight the next morning I rose and dressed, swallowed some
coffee and set out. I took a surface car downtown.
I had not been out at this hour in years. And as in my present mood,
troubled and expectant, I watched the[Pg 244] streets in the raw half-light,
they looked as utterly changed to me as though they were streets of a
different world. The department store windows looked unreal. Their soft
rich lights had been put out, and in this cold hard light of dawn all
their blandishing ladies of wax appeared like so many buxom ghosts. Men
were washing the windows. Women and girls were hurrying by, and as some
of them stopped for a moment to peer in at these phantoms of fashion,
their own faces looked equally waxen to me. A long, luxurious motor
passed with a man and a woman in evening clothes half asleep in each
other's arms. An old man with a huge pack of rags turned slowly and
stared after them. The day's work was beginning. Peddlers trundled
push-carts along, newspaper vendors opened their stands, milk wagons and
trucks from the markets came by, some on the gallop. Our car had filled
with people now. Men and boys clung to the steps behind and women and
girls were packed inside, most of them hanging to the straps. How badly
and foolishly dressed were these girls. There must be thousands of them
out. Two kept tittering inanely. All the rest were silent.
By the time that I reached the docksheds the day was breaking over their
roofs. It was freezing cold, and the chill was worse in the dock that I
entered. I buttoned my ulster tighter. The big place was dark and empty.
The dockers, I learned from the watchman, had quit work at three
o'clock, for a few tons of fruit was all the freight that remained to be
loaded. The ship was to sail at nine o'clock.
The stokers had not yet gone aboard. I found about a hundred of them
huddled along the steel wall of the shed. Some of them had old leather
grips or canvas bags, but many had no luggage at all. A few wore seedy
overcoats, but the greater part had none, they stood with their hands in
their ragged pockets, shivering and stamping. Most of them were
undersized, some tough, some rather sickly. A dull-eyed, wretched,
sodden lot. I got the liquor on[Pg 245] their breaths. A fat old Irish stoker
came drifting half-drunk up the pier with a serene and waggish smile.
"Hello," said Joe at my elbow.
He looked more fagged than the day before. I noticed that his lips were
blue and that his teeth were chattering.
"Joe," I said abruptly, "you're not fit to be here. Let's get out of
this, you belong in bed." He glanced at me impatiently.
"I'm fit enough," he muttered. "We'll stay right here and see this
show—unless you feel you want to quit——"
"Did I say I did? I'm ready enough——"
"All right, then wait a minute. They're about ready to go on board."
But as we stood and watched them, I still felt the chattering teeth by
my side, and a wave of pity and anger and of disgust swept over me. Joe
wouldn't last long at this kind of thing!
"What do you think of my friends?" he asked.
"I think you're throwing your life away!"
"Do you? How do you make it out?"
"Because they're an utterly hopeless crowd! Look at 'em—poor
devils—they look like a lot of Bowery bums!"
"Yes—they look like a lot of bums. And they feed all the fires at sea."
"Are they all like these?" I demanded.
"No better dressed," he answered. "A million lousy brothers of Christ."
"And you think you can build a new world with them?"
"No—I think they can do it themselves."
"Do you know what I think they'll do themselves? If they ever do win in
any strike and get a raise in wages—they'll simply blow it in on
drink!"
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-class gang-plank.
As they went up with their packs on[Pg 246] 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 ship, 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[Pg 247] soup with a thick, yellow
scum 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 shipped 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 nobody else
will take, it's so rotten, and here they have one week of hell 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
ship '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."[Pg 248]
"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 ashore, 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 ashore and shipped these fellows in
their places. And that makes all the difference. These chaps didn't grow
up on ships 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 hell 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 shift you're to work in," he
said, "and what other number you have to replace if he goes down. Heart
failure is damn 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 passageways 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.[Pg 249] At either end a small steel door
opened into bunkers that ran along the sides of the ship, 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
ship were rolling the masses of coal kept crashing down. Hundreds of men
had been killed that way. In the stokehole the fires were not yet up,
but by the time the ship 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 masses on the floor. On these a stream of water
played, filling the chamber with clouds of steam. In older ships, 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,
shining eyes stopped suddenly with a puz[Pg 250]zled 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 cockney. 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 ship. 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 sunshine 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[Pg 251] talking and their laughing
to the regular crash of the band—all the life of the ship 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 ship, the
stokers were still singing.[Pg 252]