The Death Ship (43 page)

“Well, well,” the skipper said. “No more questions needed. Everything is cleared up. You, my good man, wanted to stow away on a British vessel with the intention of being taken to England. I feel sure that you are not in a mood to deny this accusation. It is a very serious offense under the British law to stow away on a British vessel with the intention of entering illegally the British Isles. It will cost you no less than six months’ hard labor, perhaps even two years, and deportation. I have every right to throw you overboard, charging you with intending to blow up a British vessel in the Straits of Gibraltar and with finding explosives in your possession when arrested. Of course, as a good and law-abiding British captain, I would never do such a thing. A man like you ought to be hoisted up the mast fifty times until you’re well skinned, to remind you of the fact that a British ship is not made to help criminals run away from the police.”

What was there to say? If I had told him what I really thought of him and what I thought of the social standing of his mother, the mystery-story animals would have worked me for three hours. No longer, for I knew that my bones and my working ability were badly needed. But three hours in those gorilla hands would sure have been three very nasty hours for me, and, for the time being, I could not pay them back.

“You are not needed any more, leave us alone,” the skipper said to the huskies.

To me he said: “What are you?”

“Good deck-hand. Painting and brass-polishing, sir.”

“You are a stoker.”

“No, sir, I am not.”

“What is this? You do not mean to lie to a British captain, do you, my good man? I am informed that, yesterday afternoon, you came around and asked for a stoker’s berth, did you not?”

I did not answer. I only felt sorry that I had made the mistake of saying, the day before, that I was fireman. Had I said I was a deck-hand or a P.S., a plain sailor, they might have lost all interest in my carcass, and I would now be sitting snugly on my beloved
Yorikke
, scaling the second boiler or washing the engine-hold.

I could not wander far off with my thoughts because the skipper said: “Since you are a stoker, you may call yourself very lucky indeed. Two of my stokers have become sick. Tropical fever. You may earn your passage and your bread on my ship. Ten pounds a month, one shilling sixpence an hour overtime when on high sea. Of course, I have no right to sign you on, since you are a stowaway. Upon reaching England, I am sorry, but I shall have to deliver you to the authorities. I shall speak a word or two in your favor in court, provided you obey orders here and do your work well. You may get off with only six months, and of course you will be held for deportation. However, as long as you are here on my ship and you behave as I expect you to, you shall be treated precisely like every other member of the crew. No distinction will be made against you.”

I let him have the pleasure of being pleased with his sermon. What else could I do anyway? Nothing; no, sir.

“We may get along fine, provided you do not make any trouble here. If we do not, there will be no fresh water, but plenty of smoked herring. For this reason we would do best to tolerate one another and accept conditions as we find them. Your watch begins at twelve. Watches are six and six hours, because I have no more than two stokers, you included. The two extra hours of each watch will be paid as overtime, at one and six each hour. That will be all. Good morning.”

Ahoy, ship! There I was. Fireman on the
Empress of Madagascar
. Well on my way to the wall of my village church. I had no village church, since the last burned down in Chic during the great fire or still earlier. So even this bit of honor, finding my name next to that of the
Empress of Madagascar
on the wall of the church, was denied me.

I might become rich on this tub, for the pay was the up-to-date pay of the British firemen’s union. But then there was England with six months of hard labor and two years’ waiting for deportation day. The only trouble was that I would never get any pay in my hands. The fishes would get it. Suppose I should have the luck to get away from the reef; I would not get a bob, because I was not signed on. Since I was not signed on, I could not be called to testify in court as to the sinking. So I do not get any money from the insurance, or the board either. I have no proof that I was on the
Empress
. They might even put me in prison as an impostor claiming damages for the shipwreck.

Now, don’t you worry, old boy. We won’t make England. As to the ground, well, let’s have a look at the boats as the best and surest indication of the date.

The boats are ready. Provisions in, and sails, and fresh water. Even gin packed away to keep us jolly. Well,
Empress
, it looks to me the wedding will take place no later than the third day from now.

I have to glance about the stoke-hold to see how I can get out easiest and quickest when the rush breaks in. At the first dim crackling my hearing-flap catches, I shall be up and out so fast that even the devil running after an escaped Presbyterian preacher will get yellow with envy.

47

The quarters are clean and new, reeking with fresh paint and a washing with chloride of lime. Mattresses in the bunks, yet no pillows, no blankets, no sheets. The
Empress
is not quite so rich as she wishes to appear from the outside. It doesn’t take me long to know where the pillows and blankets have gone to.

The skipper is smarter than one might have expected. Why send the pillows, blankets, and all such things down to feed the fishes while there is still a market for them?

Most of the dishes are gone also. But enough is left for me to eat like a human being. The meal is brought into the mess by an Italian boy who chatters in a friendly way. The grub is excellent, beyond any criticism. Though I would have thought a last dinner ought to be better. At least it was better at the French fort where I was to be shot as a spy or something.

No rum ever, I am told. The skipper is bone dry and does not give out rum. Being on a ship on which no rum is handed out makes me feel as if I’m sitting in a mission and looking at the silly Bible phrases. How can you walk straight from bow to stern without having some rum laid down in your belly to hold you on your feet?

The mess-boy is calling all hands off duty for lunch.

Two heavy Negroes come in. The drags. Then the fireman comes in. He walks rather heavily and quite swanky.

Now, I have seen that face before. Somewhere. Don’t know right now where. Seems to me I must have been once on the same can with him. Wonder who he is.

His face is swollen. Both eyes blackened and blood-shot. A bandage on his head.

“Stanislav, you?”

“Pippip, you too?”

“The same, you see. Caught and caged, and perfect. Looks like we’re again in the same stoke-hold,” I said to him.

“You got the better of it, Pippip. I took them up. Had a damned fine row with them. Blacked them up and broke them half a dozen fingers. Sure. There is a palm-sized hole in the head of one of them. I got up right after I had the first blow upon my bone. You were lying flat and full out. You got a mighty buzzer under your cap. When I saw you dropping, I bent down the same instant, see. So that blow meant for me in full came on only sidewise. I got up and oared them as they sure never before had been taken. Four they were. But don’t you think for a minute that they are still four. Each is only one quarter for permanent use. Want to see them? Go to the port-side bunks. They are still cooling off and plastering all over. I lasted to the last round. But then someone, the fifth, who came in later, got me from behind. I did not know that he belonged. I thought he was rather coming to get me out and give me a hand. So I got a damned hard one on the bean.”

“What was the story the skipper told you?” I asked while we were eating.

“Me? There came in two guys telling the skipper that I had been drunk ashore and that in a fight I had stabbed and killed a man, and then I had run aboard the
Empress
to hide and stow away because the police was after me for slaying an innocent citizen of the port.”

“Almost what I was told I had done.”

“Now,” Stanislav said, “on the
Yorikke
we have lost our pay for so many months. Here we will never get a bent penny.”

“Won’t last long,” I said. “Hardly four days. He cannot take her to a better cemetery than the one he is over right now. And be sure it will happen when both you and I are on watch. We two are in boat four. I saw the list in the gangway. The firemen of the watch from twelve to four go into boat four.”

“Yep, I know it, I have seen it,” Stanislav admitted.

“Got a look at the stoke-hold? How to get out?” I asked.

“Twelve fires. Four firemen. The other two are Negroes. I guess from Kamerun or thereabouts. Speaking a bit English, and quite a bit German. All the drags are also Negroes. Only the petties are white.”

“They, of course, will be in the right boat at the right time, especially if they are limeys.”

“Telling me. Those men sitting there and eating like dogs, those are the drags of our watch.” Stanislav pointed to the two bulky Negroes at the table gulping down their food without any other interest as to what we were saying or doing. Pitiful poor devils they were.

At twelve at night we went below to start our watch. The earlier watches had been served by the donkey, with the help of the Negro drags.

We found all the fires in very bad shape. For two hours we had to work hard to get the fires trim so that they looked like something worth speaking of. Nobody seemed to care here if the fires were going fine or not, or if the steam was holding on, or if it was low to slugging-point. The furnaces were sick with clogged and burned-on slags. The Negroes had no idea how to fire, how to break a fire, and how to clean it. They just threw in as many shovels of coal as the fire would hold, and after having done this they waited to see what would happen to the fire and to the steam.

There are so many firemen, even whites, who never realize that keeping a fire in shape is an art which some men never understand. Working five years before boilers on ships does not make a man a good fireman. If he does not know the art of it, he will be as uninteresting in the stoke-hold after five years as he was when he came below for his first watch.

We had little trouble with grate-bars falling out. The rims were new, therefore wide and strong, so the bars had a good hold on them. One might say it was often hard work to get them out at all, when they had burned away and had to be changed for new ones. It was almost a real pleasure to replace them.

The Negro drags, real giants, with arms like tree-trunks, looked strong enough to carry away on their shoulders the whole boiler and take it up on deck. Yet they dragged in the fuel so slowly that we had to pep them up and curse them to the limit to get sufficient fuel to keep the fires going. Not only were they, despite their huge bodies, unable to furnish the fuel we needed, they were whining all the time that it was too hot, that they sure were just about to drop dead, that they were choking and could not get any air, that they were going to die of thirst and hunger the next minute, and that their mouths were as full of soot and ashes as if they had died already and were now swallowing earth.

“Now, just look at these black Goliaths,” Stanislav said, “dying of work which a cabin-boy might do without feeling overworked. What, compared to this, had we to drag in on the
Yorikke
? I would like to know what these mammoths really mean to do with their bones? One arm of theirs is thicker than my whole chest. Before they get in half a ton I would drag in six without even so much as wiping my sweat off. And here they have got the whole coaling-station right at arm’s length. I can’t figure that out. Not for ten dollars.”

“A pity,” I said, “to have to leave behind the
Yorikke
right now, after we have scaled the boilers and have shoveled in all the coal from the most distant bunkers. Now comes the easy time on the
Yorikke
, with fresh fuel filled up right next to the stoke-hold, and the next five or six days there would have been sheer pleasure sailing. Shit, damn the
Yorikke
, we have got other things to worry about. So, what’s the good of crying about a dame you can’t have any longer? Maybe she is going to the taxi dance. What do I care?”

I gazed about the stoke-hold, about all the gangways, hatchways and port-holes.

Stanislav followed my looks and said: “I have viewed quite a bit already. What we have to do above all is to look for air-holes where to snap out quickest and easiest. We cannot reach the gangway. That much is certain. Usually they break off first thing when the crash comes. Just fly away from the pipes and boilers when you hear the faintest crackling. The gangway leading up and out is always liable to make a trap out of which you have no chance to escape. Once up, you mostly cannot come below any more on account of steam and boiling water. So better don’t try the gangway at all.”

When I was through with my inspection I reported to Stanislav: “The upper bunker has got a hatchway leading clear out on deck. We have all the time to keep the way to this bunker clear and the hatchway loose so we can’t be caught. I shall take care to fix up a provisional rope ladder, which we’ll keep here in good shape.”

Stanislav went to examine the way I had told him about. When he came back he said: “You are smart, Pippip. I have to hand it to you. It is the surest and the only safe way out. All right, we will stick to that and make no other trial.”

Our work before the boilers was easy. We could have done all there was to do with one lazy hand. We didn’t have to worry about heaving out the ashes. The two Negro drags did it.

The engineers never pestered us; in fact, they never popped in. None of them ever complained about the steam-pressure. As long as the engine was still moving, the engineers seemed satisfied. If the
Empress
was speeding or just tumbling along on her way to the last ceremony did not concern anybody.