The Death Ship (23 page)

“Won’t you show me off to the stoke-hold?” I asked Stanislav.

He came out of the galley.

We climbed up to the upper aft deck of mid-castle. He indicated a black shaft and said: “There you see an iron ladder leading below. You can’t go wrong. I have not finished yet in the galley. Don’t know where grandfather has hidden the soap this time.”

All around me was the clear night, deep black blue. Out of this surrounding beautiful night, resting upon the lulling sea, I looked down that black shaft.

The depth appeared to have no limit. At the bottom below I saw the underworld. It was a smoke-filled hell, brightened up by darting spears of reddish light which seemed to dash out of different holes and disappear as suddenly as they had come. Every other second this underworld was wrapped in bright fire, which broke out somewhere and swept this hell below all over and went off again, leaving behind thick clouds of smoke. This smoke stayed solidly in that hole, and the underworld could now be recognized only by a very dim yellowish light.

As if he had been born out of this thick smoke, the naked shape of a human being stepped into the center of the hall. He was black from a thick layer of coal-dust which covered all of his body, and the sweat ran down him in streams, leaving glittering traces in the soot on his body. The man stood there for a while with arms folded. He stared motionless in the direction from which the reddish lights came flaring out. Now he moved heavily about and seized a long iron poker. He stepped a pace forward, bent over, and suddenly it looked as if he were swallowed up by the sea of flames which enwrapped him. He sprang forward with his poker, pushed and pulled with it as if he were fighting an escaped dragon. Then, with a swift move, he jumped back, straightened up his body, and put the poker against the wall. The flames had been quieted, and the hold was black and smoky more than ever, lightened up only with that ghostlike yellowish glimmer.

I tried to go below. No sooner had I set my foot on the fourth rung of the ladder than I felt myself being smothered by a blast of heat, by a choking oilish smoke, by thick clouds of coal-dust, and by heavy fumes of a mixture of steam, kerosene, and burning rags. I coughed and I jumped up to get fresh air into my lungs, which seemed to have become paralyzed.

There was no hope of getting away from this job. I had to try it again. No matter what happens. Below there was a human being. A living soul could breathe there in that hell. Wherever any other human being can live and work, I can. I am no exception. I am no sissy either. I have to do it. The watch has to be relieved.

Hurriedly, so as to overcome the uncomfortable effects of a plunge, I stepped down again, and right away I took six rungs. There I stopped. I could go no farther. My lungs were bursting again. I had to take in once more fresh air to survive.

I made a third attack. This time I reached a landing about four feet long and two wide. From this stage another ladder led farther below. But I could not reach it. Because through a crack in the steam-pipe, shooting up right where you had to pass, a fierce blast of overheated steam hissed across the stage near the first rung of the second ladder. I tried to make it. But my face and my arms were caught in this hot gust and I was sure I should be scalded beyond recognition, and my eyes lost, if I went on.

I knew then that I had gone the wrong way and that there must be some other way to reach the stoke-hold.

Stanislav was still in the galley and still looking for the hidden soap of the grandfather.

“I shall go below with you,” he said willingly.

On our way he asked: “You have never been part of the black crew, have you? Don’t tell me. I knew it when I had the first look at you. How come you say Gracious Lady to the winch? If she does not work and go with you as you wish, just sock her. Most dames like it. And those who don’t like it, let them go. Lots more in the world.”

I wanted to tell him that many things apparently lifeless have really souls like humans and that you have to treat them accordingly. Yet I thought there would be time enough to tell him my ideas of a sound philosophy.

So I answered only: “Right you are, Lavski. Never been before a boiler. Can hardly remember that I have ever even looked down below into the stoke-hold. Have been cabin-boy, steward, deck-hand, A.B., carpenter even. Never liked the smell of the black gang. Listen, comrade, won’t you lend me a hand for my first watch before the boilers?”

“Don’t talk nonsense. Of course I will. Know your trouble better than you do, baby blacker. It’s your first death-mobile. I know these wagons all right. Believe me. But I tell you there are times when you will thank heaven and hell for a
Yorikke
putting in port. And you hop on with all the joyful feelings you have in store, making faces at the one or the ones that are hot after you. Just call on me, sweet innocent, whenever anything goes queer. I get you out of the dirt. I even break jail for a regular guy to get him out of a jam. You see, it’s like this, old Egypt, even if we are all dead ones, all of us, it is not worth the trouble to lose heart. Don’t get down on your knees. Blare them all in their stinking faces even when sighing your last. You cannot live beyond for a thousand years or a hundred thousand with the feeling eating at you that you gave in during your last hour. Don’t lose heart. Stick it, and stick it hard. It can’t come worse. I ought to know.”

These, surely, were words to pep me up when I was so near to go bitch and ditch. However, it came worse. Much worse. One may ship on a death ship. One may be a carcass among the dead. One may be all wiped out of all that lives, one may have vanished from earth and sea, and yet there can happen horrors and tortures which you cannot escape no matter how dead you are. For when all means of escape are cut off, there is nothing left to do but to bear it.

29

Stanislav went to the shaft I had just left, which I thought was the wrong way below. He climbed down the ladder and I followed him. We came to the stage on which the steam had halted me.

I called to Stanislav: “We cannot make this. Your hide will be scalded off all your bones.”

“Don’t be funny, sailor son. I make this every twenty-four hours two dozen times. Course you have to know the trick. Tricks is the only assistance here on this pest-basin that you have to keep away from the bottom. There is no other way for us to reach the stoke-hold. The god-damned engineers, devil may have them for nothing, they don’t allow us to go through the engine-hold. They say we are too filthy and stinking and leave in the hold a smell like skunks for a week. Some day in hell we’ll all stink together and I shall call them up then.”

I watched him throw his arms about his head to protect his face and neck against the steam sword. Then, more agile and swift than a young snake, he twisted his body through this labyrinth of hissing steam-pipes and darts of shooting steam rays, so that, before I had caught my breath on seeing his elegant acrobatics, he was across to where the ladder went below.

All paddings of those pipes were rotten and in pieces, fittings burst, pipes cracked all over. Since the company had decided where to send the ship, it would have been a foolish expense to have properly repaired the steam-pipes, boilers, grates, or anything else aboard that was rotten, broken, burst, cracked, leaking. Repairs were done with the cheapest material, and done only when there was danger that the ship might go too early to the ground port. The ship had first to make some good money, by making excellent use of certain quarrels among peoples in rebellion against their protectors, who protected by mandate of sheer conquest or by mandate of the friendly acts of the noble League of Nations.

When I saw Stanislav doing the snake-dance, I thought highly of his ability, and I felt that no one else could do it so elegantly. I learned soon that every member of the black gang could do the same. He had to. Because only the best snake-dancers survived the black gang. All others who had tried and failed were no longer alive.

I now understood also why we never got food enough to feel satisfied, why we had to be undernourished. Suppose we had been fed like on a regular decent ship; we could not have done the snake-dance. Only men lean and without indigestion could reach the stoke-hold. There was a strict regulation aboard that we never must throw overboard anything which could not be eaten, but that, instead, all leftovers, even bones and crusts and rinds, had to be returned to the galley for the grandfather to make Irish stew, hash, goulash, and mock fricassee out of.

“That’s the way you have to do it, brother,” Stanislav said.

“Don’t hesitate. If you do, you are finished. You would not be the first one either. If you ever have seen a scalded guy, you won’t fail to be good.”

I did not think at all. I imitated what I had seen. And there I was, through, caught only by a few hot shots.

“Don’t feel sorry learning this elegant slip,” Stanislav said. “Acrobatics like those may be of great help some day in your life. In particular if somebody finds your hand in a pocket which is not yours. Having been an excellent snake-dancer on the
Yorikke
, believe me, the iron bars have to be damned close together or they won’t hold you for long.”

From the other side of that landing a long iron ladder, or, if you wish, gangway, led below, to the base of the underworld. This ladder, like the one I had passed already, had the rail not at the side, from which you could fall twenty feet and break your neck and bones; no, the rail was close to the brick wall of the boilers. So close, indeed, that you could hardly squeeze your hand between rail and wall. The boilers were covered with a thick brick wall in front and on all sides and on top, to keep the heat better inside. There was a reason why the rail was not outside the ladder, but against the boiler-wall. Suppose the winch that was used for heaving the ashes cracked up or otherwise went out of commission; the ash-cans had to be carried on one’s back up the ladders. This would have been rather difficult, not to say almost impossible, if the rail had been outside, for the ladder was just wide enough to be used by a single man. If this man were to carry the ashcan on his back, he could not go straight up the ladder, but had to go sideways with his face against the boiler-wall, and the ash-can hanging outside the ladder.

When I touched the rail to get a hold on it, I found it was so hot that I had to let go. It was heated partly by the immense heat of the wall and partly by the heat of the streams of steam pouring out of the many cracks.

Stanislav had a way of using that rail that was really amazing. He touched it more lightly than he would have touched eggs. He did not
go
down, but he
flew
down, playing on the rail with his finger-tips just enough to keep his equilibrium. Only when for some reason or other he seemed to sway did he grasp the rail for the fraction of a second longer and more firmly, to balance himself. A piano-player could not do better on the keys than he did on that rail.

Everything would have been easier if the shaft had had proper light. But all the light there was came from the smoky yellowish glimmer which filled the stoke-hold below.

Not being used to this ladder, I had to feel my way step by step. The rail became so hot that I felt my hands getting scorched. The lower I came, the thicker, hotter, and more choking became the smoke. The fumes from burned oil and the coal-gas from the slags pierced my lungs like poison gas. I was sure that this could not be the hell I had been condemned to go to after my death. In hell devils have to live. Yet I could not imagine for a second how it would have been possible for the most savage devil to live here and do his work of torturing poor sinners.

I looked up, and there stood a man. Naked and covered with streaming sweat and soot. He was the fireman of the watch I was to relieve now. Human beings could not live here, since devils could not. But this fireman, he could, he had to. So had all the others of the black gang. They were dead. Without a country. Without nationality. Without birth-certificates with which to prove that they had been born of a mother belonging to the human race. Men without passports by which to prove that they were citizens of the earth, given by the Lord to all animals and insects and all human beings. They could not prove their existence to the satisfaction of consuls and immigration officials and passport-printers. Devils could not live here, for some culture and civilization are left even among devils. Just ask old man Faust. He knew them personally. But men with no papers had to work here. They were not asked, they were ordered. They had to work so hard, they were chased about so mercilessly, that they forgot everything that can be forgotten. They even forgot more than that. Long ago they had forgotten their own selves; they had abandoned their souls. Whoever took the trouble to pick up their abandoned souls could have them for the taking. It would have been a feast in hell. But the devil is not hot after souls that he can have for the picking. Such souls are worthless. These humans here on the
Yorikke
forgot more than that; they went so far as to forget to think that it might be impossible to work in this hell.

Have I any right to despise the company which runs this ship and which degrades her crew to the lowest kind of treatment in order to keep down expenses and make competition possible? I have no right to hatred. If I had jumped over the railing, nobody could have made me work in this hell. I did not jump, and by not doing it I forsook my prime right to be my own master and my own lord. Since I did not take my fate into my own hands, I had no right to refuse to be used as a slave. Why do I permit myself to be tortured? Because I have hope, which is the blessing, the sin, and the curse of mankind. I hope to have a chance to come back to life again. Sooner or later. I hope to see New Orleans again and Baby waiting there, perhaps. I hope. I’d rather eat all that filth than throw my sweet and adored hope into that stinking mire.

Imperator Caesar Augustus: don’t you ever worry! You will always have gladiators. And you will have more than you will ever need. The strongest, the finest, the bravest men will be your gladiators; they will fight for you, and dying they will hail you:
Morituri te salutamus!
Hail, Cæsar Augustus! The moribund are greeting you. Happy? I am the happiest man on earth to have the honor to fight and to die for you, you god Imperator.