‘Fiddle!’ cried the iron pillars of the deep, dark hold. ‘Who ever heard of curves? Stand up straight; be a perfectly round column, and carry tons of good solid weight – like that! There!’ A big sea smashed on the deck above, and the pillars stiffened themselves to the load.
‘Straight up and down is not bad,’ said the frames, who ran that way in the sides of the ship, ‘but you must also expand yourselves sideways. Expansion is the law of life, children. Open out! open out!’
‘Come back!’ said the deck-beams, savagely, as the upward heave of the sea made the frames try to open. ‘Come back to your bearings, you slack-jawed irons!’
‘Rigidity! Rigidity! Rigidity!’ thumped the engines. ‘Absolute, unvarying rigidity – rigidity!’
‘You see!’ whined the rivets in chorus. ‘No two of you will ever pull alike, and – and you blame it all on us. We only know how to go through a plate and bite down on both sides so that it can’t, and mustn’t, and shan’t move.’
‘I’ve got one-fraction of an inch play, at any rate,’ said the garboard-strake, triumphantly. So he had, and all the bottom of the ship felt the easier for it.
‘Then we’re no good,’ sobbed the bottom rivets. ‘We were ordered – we were ordered – never to give; and we’ve given, and the sea will come in, and we’ll all go to the bottom together! First we’re blamed for everything unpleasant, and now we haven’t the consolation of having done our work.’
‘Don’t say I told you,’ whispered the Steam, consolingly; ‘but, between you and me and the last cloud I came from, it was bound to happen sooner or later. You had to give a fraction, and you’ve given without knowing it. Now, hold on, as before.’
‘What’s the use?’ a few hundred rivets chattered. ‘We’ve given – we’ve given; and the sooner we confess that we can’t keep the ship together, and go off our little heads, the easier it will be. No rivet forged can stand this strain.’
‘No one rivet was ever meant to. Share it among you,’ the Steam answered.
‘The others can have my share. I’m going to pull out,’ said a rivet in one of the forward plates.
‘If you go, others will follow,’ hissed the Steam. ‘There’s nothing so contagious in a boat as rivets going. Why, I knew a little chap like you – he was an eighth of an inch fatter, though – on a steamer – to be sure, she was only twelve hundred tons, now I come to think of it – in exactly the same place as you are. He pulled out in a bit of a bobble of a sea, not half as bad as this, and he started all his friends on the same butt-strap, and the plates opened like a furnace door, and I had to climb into the nearest fog-bank, while the boat went down.’
‘Now that’s peculiarly disgraceful,’ said the rivet. ‘Fatter than me, was he, and in a steamer not half our tonnage? Reedy little peg! I blush for the family, sir.’ He settled himself more firmly than ever in his place, and the Steam chuckled.
‘You see,’ he went on, quite gravely, ‘a rivet, and especially a rivet in your position, is really the one indispensable part of the ship.’
The Steam did not say that he had whispered the very same thing to every single piece of iron aboard. There is no sense in telling too much truth.
And all that while the little Dimbula pitched and chopped, and swung and slewed, and lay down as though she were going to die, and got up as though she had been stung, and threw her nose round and round in circles half a dozen times as she dipped; for the gale was at its worst. It was inky black, in spite of the tearing white froth on the waves, and, to top everything, the rain began to fall in sheets, so that you could not see your hand before your face. This did not make much difference to the ironwork below, but it troubled the foremast a good deal.
‘Now it’s all finished,’ he said dismally. ‘The conspiracy is too strong for us. There is nothing left but to –’
‘Hurraar! Brrrraaah! Brrrrrrp!’ roared the Steam through the foghorn, till the decks quivered. ‘Don’t be frightened, below. It’s only me, just throwing out a few words, in case anyone happens to be rolling round tonight.’
‘You don’t mean to say there’s anyone except us on the sea in such weather?’ said the funnel in a husky snuffle.
‘Scores of ’em,’ said the steam, clearing its throat; ‘Rrrrrraaa! Brraaaaa! Prrrrp! It’s a trifle windy up here; and, Great Boilers! how it rains!’
‘We’re drowning,’ said the scuppers. They had been doing nothing else all night, but this steady thrash of rain above them seemed to be the end of the world.
‘That’s all right. We’ll be easier in an hour or two. First the wind and then the rain: Soon you may make sail again! Grrraaaaaah! Drrrraaaa! Drrrp! I have a notion that the sea is going down already. If it does you’ll learn something about rolling. We’ve only pitched till now. By the way, aren’t you chaps in the hold a little easier than you were?’
There was just as much groaning and straining as ever, but it was not so loud or squeaky in tone; and when the ship quivered she did not jar stiffly, like a poker hit on the floor, but gave with a supple little waggle, like a perfectly balanced golf-club.
‘We have made a most amazing discovery,’ said the stringers, one after another. ‘A discovery that entirely changes the situation. We have found, for the first time in the history of ship-building, that the inward pull of the deck-beams and the outward thrust of the frames locks us, as it were, more closely in our places, and enables us to endure a strain which is entirely without parallel in the records of marine architecture.’
The Steam turned a laugh quickly into a roar up the fog-horn. ‘What massive intellects you great stringers have,’ he said softly, when he had finished.
‘We also,’ began the deck-beams, ‘are discoverers and geniuses. We are of opinion that the support of the hold-pillars materially helps us. We find that we lock up on them when we are subjected to a heavy and singular weight of sea above.’
Here the Dimbula shot down a hollow, lying almost on her side – righting at the bottom with a wrench and a spasm.
‘In these cases – are you aware of this, Steam? – the plating at the bows, and particularly at the stern – we would also mention the floors beneath us – help us to resist any tendency to spring.’ The frames spoke, in the solemn, awed voice which people use when they have just come across something entirely new for the very first time.
‘I’m only a poor puffy little flutterer,’ said the Steam, ‘but I have to stand a good deal of pressure in my business. It’s all tremendously interesting. Tell us some more. You fellows are so strong.’
‘Watch us and you’ll see,’ said the bow-plates, proudly. ‘Ready, behind there! Here’s the Father and Mother of Waves coming! Sit tight, rivets all!’ A great sluicing comber thundered by, but through the scuffle and confusion the Steam could hear the low, quick cries of the ironwork as the various strains took them – cries like these: ‘Easy, now – easy! Now push for all your strength! Hold out! Give a fraction! Hold up! Pull in! Shove crossways! Mind the strain at the ends! Grip, now! Bite tight! Let the water get away from under – and there she goes!’
The wave raced off into the darkness, shouting, ‘Not bad, that, if it’s your first run!’ and the drenched and ducked ship throbbed to the beat of the engines inside her. All three cylinders were white with the salt spray that had come down through the engine-room hatch; there was white fur on the canvas-bound steam-pipes, and even the bright-work deep below was speckled and soiled; but the cylinders had learned to make the most of steam that was half water, and were pounding along cheerfully.
‘How’s the noblest outcome of human ingenuity hitting it?’ said the Steam, as he whirled through the engine-room.
‘Nothing for nothing in this world of woe,’ the cylinders answered, as though they had been working for centuries, ‘and precious little for seventy-five pounds’ head. We’ve made two knots this last hour and a quarter! Rather humiliating for eight hundred horse-power, isn’t it?’
‘Well, it’s better than drifting aste
rn, at any rate. You seem rather less – how shall I put it? – stiff in the back than you were.’
‘If you’d been hammered as we’ve been this night, you wouldn’t be stiff – iff – iff, either. Theoreti – retti – retti – cally, of course, rigidity is the thing. Purr – purr – practically, there has to be a little give and take. We found that out by working on our sides for five minutes at a stretch – chch – chh. How’s the weather?’
‘Sea’s going down fast,’ said the Steam.
‘Good business,’ said the high-pressure cylinder. ‘Whack her up, boys. They’ve given us five pounds more steam’; and he began humming the first bars of ‘Said the young Obadiah to the old Obadiah’, which, as you may have noticed, is a pet tune among engines not built for high speed. Racing-liners with twin-screws sing ‘The Turkish Patrol’ and the overture to the ‘Bronze Horse’, and ‘Madame Angot’, till something goes wrong, and then they render Gounod’s ‘Funeral March of a Marionette’, with variations.
‘You’ll learn a song of your own some fine day,’ said the Steam, as he flew up the fog-horn for one last bellow.
Next day the sky cleared and the sea dropped a little, and the Dimbula began to roll from side to side till every inch of iron in her was sick and giddy. But luckily they did not all feel ill at the same time: otherwise she would have opened out like a wet paper box.
The Steam whistled warnings as he went about his business: it is in this short, quick roll and tumble that follows a heavy sea that most of the accidents happen, for then everything thinks that the worst is over and goes off guard. So he orated and chattered till the beams and frames and floors and stringers and things had learned how to lock down and lock up on one another, and endure this new kind of strain.
They found ample time to practise, for they were sixteen days at sea, and it was foul weather till within a hundred miles of New York. The Dimbula picked up her pilot, and came in covered with salt and red rust. Her funnel was dirty grey from top to bottom; two boats had been carried away; three copper ventilators looked like hats after a fight with the police; the bridge had a dimple in the middle of it; the house that covered the steam steering-gear was split as with hatchets; there was a bill for small repairs in the engine-room almost as long as the screw-shaft; the forward cargo-hatch fell into bucket-staves when they raised the iron cross-bars; and the steam-capstan had been badly wrenched on its bed. Altogether, as the skipper said, it was ‘a pretty general average’.
‘But she’s soupled,’ he said to Mr Buchanan. ‘For all her dead weight she rode like a yacht. Ye mind that last blow off the Banks? I am proud of her, Buck.’
‘It’s vera good,’ said the chief engineer, looking along the dishevelled decks. ‘Now, a man judgin’ superfeecially would say we were a wreck, but we know otherwise – by experience.’
Naturally everything in the Dimbula fairly stiffened with pride, and the foremast and the forward collision-bulkhead, who are pushing creatures, begged the Steam to warn the Port of New York of their arrival. ‘Tell those big boats all about us,’ they said. ‘They seem to take us quite as a matter of course.’
It was a glorious, clear, dead calm morning, and in single file, with less than half a mile between each, their bands playing and their tugboats shouting and waving handkerchiefs, were the Majestic, the Paris, the Touraine, the Servia, the Kaiser Wilhelm II, and the Werkendam, all statelily going out to sea. As the Dimbula shifted her helm to give the great boats clear way, the Steam (who knows far too much to mind making an exhibition of himself now and then) shouted:
‘Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! Princes, Dukes, and Barons of the High Seas! Know ye by these presents, we are the Dimbula, fifteen days nine hours from Liverpool, having crossed the Atlantic with four thousand ton of cargo for the first time in our career! We have not foundered. We are here. ’Eer! ’Eer! We are not disabled. But we have had a time wholly unparalleled in the annals of ship-building! Our decks were swept! We pitched; we rolled! We thought we were going to die! Hi! Hi! But we didn’t. We wish to give notice that we have come to New York all the way across the Atlantic, through the worst weather in the world; and we are the Dimbula! We are – arr – ha – ha – ha-r-r-r!’
The beautiful line of boats swept by as steadily as the procession of the Seasons. The Dimbula heard the Majestic say, ‘Hmph!’ and the Paris grunted, ‘How!’ and the Touraine said, ‘Oui!’ with a little coquettish flicker of steam; and the Servia said, ‘Haw!’ and the Kaiser and the Werkendam said, ‘Hoch!’ Dutch fashion – and that was absolutely all.
‘I did my best,’ said the Steam, gravely, ‘but I don’t think they were much impressed with us, somehow. Do you?’
‘It’s simply disgusting,’ said the bow-plates. ‘They might have seen what we’ve been through. There isn’t a ship on the sea that has suffered as we have – is there, now?’
‘Well, I wouldn’t go so far as that,’ said the Steam, ‘because I’ve worked on some of those boats and sent them through weather quite as bad as the fortnight that we’ve had, in six days; and some of them are a little over ten thousand tons, I believe. Now I’ve seen the Majestic, for instance, ducked from her bows to her funnel; and I’ve helped the Arizona, I think she was, to back off an iceberg she met with one dark night; and I had to run out of the Paris’s engine-room, one day, because there was thirty foot of water in it. Of course, I don’t deny –’ The Steam shut off suddenly, as a tug-boat, loaded with a political club and a brass band, that had been to see a New York Senator off to Europe, crossed their bows, going to Hoboken. There was a long silence that reached, without a break, from the cut-water to the propeller-blades of the Dimbula.
Then a new, big voice said slowly and thickly, as though the owner had just waked up: ‘It’s my conviction that I have made a fool of myself.’
The Steam knew what had happened at once; for when a ship finds herself all the talking of the separate pieces ceases and melts into one voice, which is the soul of the ship.
‘Who are you?’ he said, with a laugh.
‘I am the Dimbula, of course. I’ve never been anything else except that – and a fool!’
The tugboat, which was doing its very best to be run down, got away just in time, its band playing clashily and brassily a popular but impolite air:
In the days of old Rameses – are you on?
In the days of old Rameses – are you on?
In the days of old Rameses,
That story had paresis,3
Are you on – are you on – are you on?
‘Well, I’m glad you’ve found yourself,’ said the Steam. ‘To tell the truth I was a little tired of talking to all those ribs and stringers. Here’s Quarantine. After that we’ll go to our wharf and clean up a little, and – next month we’ll do it all over again.’
William the Conqueror1
I
I have done one braver thing
Than all the worthies did;
And yet a braver thence doth spring,
Which is to keep that hid.
The Undertaking.2
‘Is it officially declared yet?’
‘They’ve gone as far as to admit extreme local scarcity, and they’ve started relief-works in one or two districts, the paper says.’
‘That means it will be declared as soon as they can make sure of the men and the rolling-stock. Shouldn’t wonder if it were as bad as the Big Famine.’
‘Can’t be,’ said Scott, turning a little in the long cane chair. ‘We’ve had fifteen-anna3 crops in the north, and Bombay and Bengal report more than they know what to do with. They’ll be able to check it before it gets out of hand. It will only be local.’
Martyn picked up the Pioneer4 from the table, read through the telegrams once more, and put up his feet on the chair-rests. It was a hot, dark, breathless evening, heavy with the smell of the newly-watered Mall. The flowers in the Club gardens were dead and black on their stalks, the little lotus-pond was a circle of caked mud, and the tamarisk-trees were white wit
h the dust of days. Most of the men were at the band-stand in the public gardens – from the Club verandah you could hear the native Police band hammering stale waltzes – or on the polo-ground or in the high-walled fives-court, hotter than a Dutch oven. Half a dozen grooms, squatted at the heads of their ponies, waited their masters’ return. From time to time a man would ride at a foot-pace into the Club compound, and listlessly loaf over to the whitewashed barracks beside the main building. These were supposed to be chambers. Men lived in them, meeting the same faces night after night at dinner, and drawing out their office-work till the latest possible hour, that they might escape that doleful company.
‘What are you going to do?’ said Martyn, with a yawn. ‘Let’s have a swim before dinner.’
‘Water’s hot,’ said Scott. ‘I was at the bath today.’
‘Play you game o’ billiards – fifty up.’
‘It’s a hundred and five in the hall now. Sit still and don’t be so abominably energetic.’
A grunting camel swung up to the porch, his badged and belted rider fumbling a leather pouch.
‘Kubber-kargaz – ki – yektraaa,’5 the man whined, handing down the newspaper extra – a slip printed on one side only, and damp from the press. It was pinned on the green baize-board, between notices of ponies for sale and fox-terriers missing.
Martyn rose lazily, read it, and whistled. ‘It’s declared!’ he cried. ‘One, two, three – eight districts go under the operations of the Famine Code6 ek dum.7 They’ve put Jimmy Hawkins in charge.’
‘Good business!’ said Scott, with the first sign of interest he had shown. ‘When in doubt hire a Punjabi.8 I worked under Jimmy when I first came out and he belonged to the Punjab. He has more bundobust9 than most men.’
‘Jimmy’s a Jubilee Knight10 now,’ said Martyn. ‘He was a good chap, even though he is a thrice-born civilian11 and went to the Benighted Presidency.12 What unholy names these Madras districts rejoice in – all ungas or rungas or pillays or polliums.’