The Sand Pebbles (16 page)

Holman looked at Lt. Collins. Neither spoke. They both had blood on them. Holman knelt and took out the jacking gear. He could see that the shaft had turned inside the worm wheel. He stood up again and he was beginning to shake.

“I guess we can get underway now, sir,” he said.

Lt. Collins seemed to jerk. “Yes. Yes, we can,” he said.

He went up the ladder and Holman went around to the throttle. Lynch’s face was working and he had tears in his eyes. “I wouldn’t trust you to hold it,” he kept saying, half to himself.

“Nobody had time to think,” Holman said. He took the control from Lynch.

“I guess I’ll go stand by the sickbay, see about old Chien,” Lynch said.

He went up. He would stop for a slug of rum first, Holman knew. They were all clearing out, even the coolie work gang. Holman started to open the throttle bypass, to let warming steam into the engine, and found it already open. He knew he had closed it. His arm
muscles remembered closing it. But it was open, and that steam might have been just the extra push … It shook Holman. He didn’t know what to do. Finally he pretended to open it, and he did not think Burgoyne noticed.

They got underway and the L.P. still thumped, but it would take them to Paoshan. Burgoyne had to keep going out to the fireroom to check the stoker coolies, because Chien would not be doing that any more. Po-han did his oiling and tending, but he walked wide as he could of the L.P. crank. Nobody wanted to talk. Once Burgoyne said, “God damn it! You know, just God damn it all to hell! Poor old Chien,” and then he packed his lip nervously with snuff. They worked up to eight knots and moored to the Paoshan pontoon at about five o’clock, and Lt. Collins went ashore with Franks’ landing force section while Pappy Tung was still doubling up lines.

Holman ate a late supper in dungarees and came out on deck. Bordelles told him to bear a hand and shift uniform and fall in with the reserve landing section. Farren and the others were already standing by under arms on the quarterdeck. Lynch was there, with the OOD duty.

“I got to repair the jacking gear and refit a crank bearing,” Holman said.

“The bilge coolies will do that,” Bordelles said.

“I don’t think they can, without Chien,” Holman said. “What do you think, Chief?”

“I don’t know about them other ones, how much they know,” Lynch said. “Maybe Jake better supervise it, Mr. Bordelles.”

“Why can’t you do that?”

“Got the duty.” Lynch slapped his pistol.

“Well … all right.” Bordelles didn’t like it.

Holman told Po-han to round up four coolies and put them to unbolting the big L.P. cylinder cover and wiping out the crankpit. He and Po-han repaired the jacking gear. The worm wheel fit over a collar on the shaft and it was meant to be locked in place by two square keys. Both keys were gone. One had been gone a long time
and paint was so thick over the empty keyway that it was hard to tell it was even there. The other key had worked out with the jarring vibration that day, and nothing but rust had been holding the worm wheel when old Chien had gotten down into the crankpit and trusted his life to it.

That was how it was with machinery, and Holman explained it to Po-han. If you were sloppy and ignorant with machinery, sooner or later it would kill you. It didn’t matter how well you meant or how pure your heart was. But if you knew how and did take care of machinery, you were safer than you were in church. Old Chien was still alive up in the sickbay, holding on like a cat, Jennings said, and they would try to get a missionary doctor for him. But old Chien was through in the
San Pablo
engine room.

“My sabby, Jehk,” Po-han said solemnly.

Holman found keystock in the rack under the workbench and they cut and fitted two new keys. With a light chisel, Holman upset the collar and gear metal over each end of each key, to hold them in place no matter how much the shaft vibrated. When they had more time, they would put a countersunk machine screw through each key, he told Po-han. Po-han nodded eagerly. He understood the principle.

Holman watched the four coolies work. They were suddenly friendly and anxious to please him, instead of being hostile and suspicious, and he was hoping to make the same kind of contact with them that he had with Po-han. They knew the job. They made up their beam clamps solidly and ran their eyebolts all the way in and they were clever riggers with their slings and chainfalls. They lifted aside the big cylinder cover and hoisted the piston and rod assembly and they walked the two bearing halves out on the floorplates very nicely. Chiu-pa seemed to have charge of them.

The bearing looked terrible. In some places the metal was black with burnt oil and in others it was pounded smooth and silvery. Black and silver needles of wiped metal filled the oil grooves. Holman worked on the bottom half; he could not hold off any longer. He cleaned out the oil grooves with a cape chisel and scraped the carbonized
patches until the metal stopped coming off as gray dust and curled away in clean, silvery flakes. His hands enjoyed it and his eyes enjoyed seeing the bruised and dirty metal turn clean and frosty with scraper marks. It was like healing something ulcerated, making it whole and sound again. He began taking spots with the mandrel and scraping for a fit. Chiu-pa was scraping the top half and Holman saw that he was going much faster than Chiu-pa. He stopped to show Po-han how to scrape.

Po-han was awkward. The scraper was a large three-cornered file with four inches of the small end ground smooth and grooved along each flat and the edges stoned sharp and smooth. The right hand had to learn a special rock and draw and the left hand had to learn how to pivot and tilt the edge for depth of cut. Holman could nip off a flake the size of a pinhead or curl off a long, broad shaving, without thinking how he did it, but he broke it down to fundamentals to show Po-han. The idle coolies squatted around grinning and watching and Holman had them all try their hands at it. They laughed and kidded in Chinese at each other’s fumbles. The one called Pai was pretty good with a scraper.

They were all clever to pick up the how of it, but only Po-han could handle the why. They had a hollow steel mandrel the same size as the crankpin and they would coat it all over lightly with Prussian blue and roll it sliding around in a clean bearing half. When they lifted it out, blue would show on the contact points and they would scrape bearing metal off only under the blue highspots. After each scraping and test, the blue spots were bigger and there were more of them. Holman tried to explain about even distribution of load in the bearing so that no one area would have too big a share of the load and squeeze out the oil film and wipe. Po-han had to help the others in Chinese, because their English was not as good as his. Each blue spot was like a coolie who helped to hold the load of full engine power, Holman told them; so the bigger the coolies and the more of them and the better spaced they were, the better they could hold the load. Pai and Dong and Chiu-pa did not get it. They could see the little blue coolies in the top half taking the gravity load of the piston
and rod assembly, but they thought the coolies in the bottom half were loafers. They simply did not have the basic idea of energy flow.

Po-han got it. He acted it out, fisting his arms around like a crank and saying, “Pushee pushee! Pullee pullee!” while the others looked at him in wonder.

Yet Chiu-pa could spot and scrape and fit a bearing almost as skillfully as Holman. He did not need to know why he was doing what he did. It was just old custom. The stuff about little blue coolies was no more than a pleasant story to go with a piece of old custom. Well, they were all older men than Po-han, Holman thought. Maybe you had to be young.

It was not old custom with Chiu-pa to round the edges of oil grooves, but when he saw how Holman did it he was willing to do the same. They put the refitted bearing back in place, working very handily, and slugged it up with lead wires squeezed inside to measure the oil clearance. When Holman wanted to take out shims to set the oil clearance at six thousandths, Chiu-pa objected. He was very sure that if it were not set at ten thousandths the bearing would burn out. He did not think of it as a figure or any kind of measurement, but only as matching scratch marks, probably made by old Chien, on the micrometer barrel and spindle. Well, if the engine was out of line, you would want more clearance to allow for that, Holman thought. There was something to be said for old custom, after all. He set it at ten.

When the job was done and all of them had gone up except the watch coolie, it was nearly midnight. Holman felt tired and good. He felt satisfied at finally getting his hands on the machinery, and he was not going to let it go again. He made a pot of coffee and sat on the workbench drinking a cup of it. Wilsey came down in whites to write up the log. He spread out a rag and sat beside Holman on the workbench and had a cup of the coffee. They talked about Chien.

“Them keys gone. Who’d ever’ve thought about that?”

“Everybody, after today,” Holman said.

“Yeah, I guess. But you just never know, do you?”

“You can know if you want to,” Holman said.

They heard noise topside. The landing force was back. Perna and Stawski came down and poured coffee and sat on the workbench. It was the first time they had ever come down off watch to drink engine room coffee. Wilsey told them about the keys.

“It was them keys gone, huh, Jake?” Stawski said. “You sure it was them keys gone done it, huh?” He was eager about it.

“Sure. Hell, yes,” Holman said. “What else?”

“It was them keys, all right,” Stawski said.

“All shows to go you,” Wilsey said.

“We brought a missionary doctor back to look at Chien,” Perna said. “He’s up there now.”

“They was all holed up in their compounds and the doctor didn’t want to come out,” Stawski said. “The skipper really blistered his ass for him, way Bronson tells it.”

“Wish I’d heard it,” Wilsey said. “Prong missionaries.”

“I was just thinking, working on that bearing,” Holman said. “Any of you guys ever figure out just what it is you do, when you fit a bearing?”

“You spot and scrape and take leads,” Wilsey said.

“Yeah, but why? What do you
mean
by
fit?”

“Well,
fit
. Everybody knows that.” Wilsey waggled his foot out in front of him. “Just
fit
. Like your foot in a shoe.”

“In a bearing, it means equal distribution of load,” Holman said.

“So what?” Perna said.

They didn’t want to talk about bearings. Perna told about the rioting. The mob was out in the streets, all right, yelling and milling, but the Sand Pebbles had gone right on through to the warlord’s
yamen
. Lt. Collins had offered very politely to help the warlord stop the rioting and the warlord had declined politely and sent out his soldiers to do it alone. In a few hours they had the streets clear and quiet. The Sand Pebbles had gotten a good chow out of it, but Franks would not let them drink the warlord’s
samshu
. Afterward, they had checked all the missions. No palefaces had been hurt. Only a few native Christians had been killed.

“One mission, they offered us all a glass of milk,” Stawski said.

“What started them rioting anyway?” Holman asked.

“Some slopeheads claimed they saw a missionary woman boiling babies,” Perna said. “So they all went wild.”

“Them missionaries ought to be more careful who they let see ’em, when they’re boiling babies,” Wilsey said.

Chien still had life in the morning, like an ember in ashes. The mission doctor wanted him to die on the
San Pablo
. When a Chinese died in a mission hospital, a story always started that the missionaries had murdered him so they could use his eyes to make camera lenses. If Chien died ashore, it might renew the rioting.

After breakfast Bordelles took his landing force section on a boat trip to a rural mission about fifteen miles from Paoshan. The city looked normal, gates open in the gray stone walls and the line of water coolies chanting and slopping up the stone steps from the river. Not far above the city Farren turned the motor sampan into a broad creek. With his red beard under his white sun helmet and his strong, tanned bare legs, Farren looked like a pirate at the tiller. Bordelles sat beside him. Holman, Crosley, Tullio, Red Dog and Ellis sprawled on the thwarts in the waist.

“You’re gonna light a fire under China Light, huh, Mr. Bordelles?” Red Dog said.

“Going to try,” Bordelles said. “Anyway, it won’t hurt to show the flag and a party of armed men to any bandits down off that mountain today.”

Holman sat up straight. China Light was Miss Eckert’s mission. He wondered if he might see her. He wished he had not spoken so harshly that last time they had talked.

It was a clear, sunny morning and they had a lunch packed under the stern sheets. It began to seem like a picnic to Holman. The creek wound through green fields. It was stone-banked much of the way and overhung by drooping willow and mulberry trees. Children rode on water buffaloes that grazed along the bank. Other children tended duck flocks. They beat the ducks with bright rag scraps at the end of strings dangling like whips from long bamboo poles. The ducks quacked, but it did not hurt them. The children ran and hid and the buffaloes tossed their heads and snorted, when they saw the boatload of armed ocean devils. Then the children peeped out again, very curious. But the grown people working in the fields or floating down to Paoshan in sampans filled with garden stuff only stared with blank faces.

Away from the ship, Bordelles was quite democratic. He was tall and gawky, with a big nose and chin that would make a fine admiral’s mask someday. Holman began asking him questions about China Light. He learned that it was more than just a church and a school. It owned a lot of surrounding farmland. Hundreds of Chinese lived there, and about a dozen palefaces. It was supposed to be under the fat warlord in Paoshan, but it was also claimed by the bandit chief on the mountain, who was squaring around to fight the warlord.