"C Q", or, In the Wireless House/Chapter 1

by Arthur Train

 

“C. Q.”;
or, In the Wireless House

 

“C. Q.”;
or, In the Wireless House

I

“Micky” quarrels with the captain of the “Pavonia,” and becomes pals with a lady in high society.

THE chief trouble with “Micky” Fitz, as he was called, was that the women all fell in love with him. And as he was generally a totally unconscious factor in the proceeding, he can hardly be held responsible, although it can not be denied that he was usually receptive and on occasion even provocative, for he was a sailor-man—of a sort—and English, in spite of his name.

This, however, did not prevent his utter disgrace and prompt banishment from his uncle’s vicarage when he and the Hon. Evelyn Arabella Farquhar were caught by the head gardener kissing in the lilac arbor, and the matter was reported to the irascible Earl, her grandpapa. For the golden-haired, rose-cheeked Hon. Evelyn was a great person in the land, and the “Peerage” said that she was a lady (with a capital L) of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, and that her father, the Viscount, was a general in India; while Michael Fitzpatrick was only a common or garden son of a second son, with no pretensions to aristocracy save through the elder branch of the family, which paid no attention to his trifling existence.

So the Earl, as was his prerogative, was exceeding wroth, and, having sent for the much-embarrassed vicar, made it entirely unequivocal that Michael was to be deported beyond seas,—to Prince Rupert or Pekin, or Zanzibar,—where he could never more see his dream lady until she was safely married to a gentleman of at least her own rank and fortune. And the vicar, who, although he possessed the advowson of his own living, nevertheless feared the Earl and needed him in his business,—and who, incidentally, did not believe in kissing, either,—had a brief but serious talk with his scandalous nephew in the vicarage library, from which they both emerged very red.

Later in the afternoon the Hon. Evelyn, having escaped from her governess (she was only fifteen and three-quarters), met Micky, this time m the grove back of the second game-keeper’s and swore eternal fealty to him with her head on his shoulder, and they exchanged rings.

Ever since his father, the captain, had been killed before Bloemfontein in the early gray of an August morning by a whining Mauser bullet sent by a bushy-bearded Boer from an almost invisible kopje a mile away, and he had been taken out of school and sent to live with his uncle, his father’s younger brother, at Toppmgham, Micky had been in love with Evelyn Farquhar. He liked all girls and most boys just as they liked him, and why Evelyn inspired this particular ardor in his youthful heart he could not have explained. Perhaps it was because this motherless boy (his mother had died while bringing him into the world) had come to Toppingham racked with grief at the loss of his father and keenly sensitive to sympathy of any kind, and had remained so for a long time.

Of course she had been a mere child then, but in those days the Earl had never thought of objecting to his playing all day long with the little lady whose inclinations toward her old playmate now gave her grandfather such anxiety. So Micky had lay lessons of the curate—an explosive, tennis-playing, supercilious young man—and on Sundays recited his catechism and the collects to the vicar, who was really interested only in geology and model tenements, and the rest of the time—that is, until he went to Harrow—he spent racing over the lawns of Toppingham or paddling in a punt on the muddy little “Avon” with the little girl who, now that he was a grown man and ready to go to Sandhurst maybe (if his uncle approved), was father and mother and sister and sweetheart to him, all in one.

For Micky did not like his uncle the vicar, and neither did Evelyn, and both of them imagined Micky as very much oppressed and unfairly treated, and believed themselves to be the victims of a conspiracy between this wicked ecclesiastic (who was really a very harmless person) and the Earl of Toppingham, whose name was Richard de Coyne St. Gower Hugh Fane-Crichton, and who was a Scottish peer besides, and were at times very miserable and very happy and really for their ages (which are the very best ages for that purpose) passionately in love with each other.

So he left her in the sweet, shadowy fragrance of the early evening, standing among the tree trunks with her arms outstretched to him, a brave smile on her lips, trying to keep back her tears,—a slender, wistful figure in a white frock that did not quite reach to the top of her shoes, her hair in rippling golden torrents blown toward him over her shoulders by a soft caressing breeze that bore a quivering “Good-by, Micky dear!” to his yearning ears.

Then, with a heart excitedly thumping and pumping a strange and mysterious exuberance all through his slender body, Micky packed a hand-bag, and, without saying as much as good-by to the vicar, walked four miles to the station and caught the 8.43 for Liverpool. For though he was nineteen, he did not know what was right and proper or to be expected of a mere son of a second son. Incidentally he earned in his left-hand breast pocket a cabinet photograph of his Lady of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, showing her in long hair and standing beside a big St. Bernard dog.

This was three years ago, and in all that time he had heard from her only once, and that was when she had mailed him a post-card from Cortina d’Ampezzo six weeks after his departure, showing a Tyrolese couple in dancing costume and bearing the strange and unintelligible symbols (save to Micky), “I. L. Y.”—which are the initials of the most important sentence in all history.

Those three years on the sea had made a man of him, but they had not changed his attitude toward Lady Evelyn or the Earl; and both the photograph and the Tyrolese dancers occupied a conspicuous position on the wall over bis bunk in the wireless house on the Pavonia. Yet during that time there had been many candidates for Lady Evelyn’s position—lithe, smoky Arab girls In Tangier, starchy pink-and-white stewardesses, smart daughters of prosperous resident officers, and many ladles of high degree on the first-cabin passenger list. But he had discouraged them all and kept his heart true to the memory of the grove behind the second gamekeeper’s.

“An infectious little red devil!” Mrs. Hubert Trevelyan called him—she of the white pony-coat and the string of melting blue-white pearls, who liked to joke with Micky on the boat deck and visit him in the wireless house, and whose full-blown, rosily radiant beauty filled him with a vague uneasiness. Yet it was not his looks,— he had freckles, blue eyes, and auburn-red hair,—but his smile that drew people to him, first and second cabin alike, and made it quite impossible for even the purple-nosed captain to be as harsh with him as his escapades deserved—as, for example, that night at Algiers when he had kept the ship waiting an hour, with the tide on the ebb, while he won £i6 at the little horses in the Casino. And this particular captain was, at that, the worst it had been his ill luck to serve under in either the Pacific, the Atlantic, or the Indian Ocean, since his first job en the old Fulda of the Lloyds’. Now he earned £3 per month on a 17,000-ton Cunarder, was rated as an assistant purser and ranked the barber and Hooks, the head second-cabin steward.

It had been quite natural for him to go into the Marconi service, for he had always dabbled in electricity and had worked an amateur “wireless” between the roof of the vicarage and that of the village tinsmith who was the father of his childhood’s companion, Tommy Burcher. Tommy was the only one of his friends with whom he still kept in constant communication and from whom he learned the comings and goings of the Hon. Evelyn: how she now had her hair up and looked a ripper; how the family had taken her up to London and brought her out with a great party at Carlton Terrace; how she had been presented at Court; and how they had been filling the house with old bucks and young bucks, and been having party after party, until Tommy (who was not invited) said it quite turned his stomach. But never a word from the Hon. Evelyn, who, according to the ill-spelled and worse-expressed missives of the correspondent, was growing more of a stunner daily. As each letter was received and read in the privacy of the wireless house, Micky would grind his teeth, swear at the Earl and the vicar, and then smoke his pipe furiously for about an hour—after which life resumed its ordinary color. A letter had come that very day, with the usual consequences.

“Damn all the women!” he growled, still smoking, as he saw Mrs. Hubert Trevelyan’s copious blonde coiffure bobbing up the ladder that led to the little coop which served him as office, bedroom, and parlor, and was situated on top of the deck-house in the after part of the Pavonia. Passengers were forbidden access to it; but for Mrs. Trevelyan anything forbidden was sweet—particularly the society of Micky Fitz. And she had no sooner gained the top of the deck-house, and begun adjusting the folds of her white pony-coat and her trim sailor hat, than a steward scurried up after her and knocked on the door of the wireless house.

“Cap’n says report to him at once, and no first-cabin passengers allowed aft the second-cabin deck!” said he rudely.

“Curse the Captain!” snorted Micky. “I suppose I ’ll catch it good and hearty for givin’ out that bulletin this afternoon! Good evening, Mrs. Trevelyan. Sorry I can’ t receive you. The Captain’s sent for me—most pressin’ and particular!”

He smiled a soul-engaging, freckled smile.

“Oh, you naughty child!” protested Mrs. Trevelyan, shaking her finger at him. “Well, I ’ll wait for you! Don’t be long. I am quite afraid to stay here all alone. What if a big sailor should come up?”

“Just shake your finger at him!” replied Micky.

He left her standing gracefully in the wind, the breeze tossing her hair from her white temples and outlining her shapely form under the white coat that floated behind her like the robe of the Wingless Victory. He hurried across the second-cabin deck, where trim, pipe-smoking valets were walking up and down with carefully got up ladies’ maids, and where a husky, swarthy-cheeked chauffeur was playing shuffle-board with a little hunchback boy whose cheerful yet wistful smile made him the pet and comrade of the entire company. He climbed the ladder to the main deck, and stepped gingerly by the ranks of first-cabin passengers—muffled figures “laid out,” as it were, in grotesque rows, their noses buried in books or gazing in sorrowful meditation upon the long rollers that swung past the ship eastward toward Portugal. He dodged in and out between the pedestrians, who, in ill-assorted pairs, blocked the deck and got in one another’s way —lovers actual and prospective, husbands dutifully “exercising” their wives, old folks crawling around the ship and congesting the narrow thoroughfare until those behind turned right about face and retreated in the other direction—everybody trying to stimulate appetites stultified by Scotch breakfasts eaten berthwise at late morning hours, and struggling against that inexplicable tired feeling that accompanies a long liner's slow pitch when running against the sea. He ducked under the upraised arm of the bugler, just beginning the first bar of “Roast Beef of Old England,” made a wry face at him, and then, with supernatural gravity, saluted the Captain.

“You young scamp!” roared the officer. “What do you mean by giving out the press news and letting it be posted on the bulletin-board? Don’t you know this ship does n’t subscribe for it? Look at this thing! I tore it down myself five minutes ago!”

He held out a crumpled sheet of ship’s writing-paper, upon which appeared, in Mrs. Hubert Trevelyan’s obvious chirography, a résumé of the wireless news sent out from Poldhu early that morning. The lady had been flippant, and the sheet was headed: “The Pavonia’s Daily Scream.” Underneath were imitation newspaper columns entitled “Society Jottings,” “Marine News,” “Birth List,” and other harmless pleasantries, but containing the actual six hundred words taken by Micky out of the air for which the company had not paid.

“If that is reported it will cost me exactly twenty pounds!” shouted the Captain, glaring at him.

“Very sorry, sir!” answered Micky respectfully. “I did n’t post it, and I don't know who did. I merely handed a copy to you, as usual, at breakfast. Of course, if by any chance one of the passengers saw your copy—!”

“You impudent young jackanapes!” retorted the Captain furiously. “My copy, indeed! You gave it out to some woman—you know you did! What ’s more, you let them come up to the wireless house! I ’ve seen them myself. If I catch another living soul there, I ’ll have you discharged.”

“Very good, sir,” replied Micky stolidly. “Of course, if you didn't give out the news the Marconi Company can’t charge the boat for it; and if I gave it out, the company will sack me. So far as the passengers coming up is concerned, I wish you would devise some way to keep ’em out. I can’t. I ’m sure the company wouldn't like it, and it interferes horribly with my work. Is that all, sir? And shall I take the news for you to-night, sir?”

The Captain gave Micky one withering look and brushed by him without reply. He had no evidence as to how the news had leaked out, and he was quite aware of it. In addition, he had no business to get the news himself, if his ship was not a subscriber. Of course they all did get it. There it was in the air, and all you had to do was to tune in and swipe it. The company expected it, and you did n’t deprive anybody of anything by so doing. Even if you had n’t subscribed, it was n’t to be expected that men out of sight of land were going to be conscientious to the extent of avoiding knowing whether London had been blown up or who had won the Derby. The morning flimsy from the wireless house was a sort of daily courtesy from the Marconi people to the Captain. If he did n’t want it—why, he could leave it, that was all.

All this the purple Captain knew very well, but he was angry and upset, for the home office had held him over two days at Genoa to take those of the Olympic’s passengers, who after her collision with the Hawke had shrewdly figured out that the only way of making sure of getting home was by the southern route, and had had the Pavonia held by wire from London in consequence.

Mrs. Trevelyan had been one of these, and for four days now she had sat his right hand and made love to him. The ship was jammed to the bulwarks, with first-cabin passengers sleeping in threes in second-class state-rooms, and everybody was growling except the stewards and stewardesses, who already heard the clink of golden sovereigns on every hand. It was a “stewardesses’ trip,” for the ladies-maids could find no berths in the first-cabin quarters and were ignominiously consigned to the second cabin, where, with noses in air, they sat at meals in undignified juxtaposition with chauffeurs, Turks, professors, Mafiusi from Palermo and Camorristi from Naples, rug merchants from Beirut and Antioch, Mennonite bishops. Baptist missionaries, and millionaire lemon growers from Morocco, Oran, and the yellow-red confines of the northern desert. It was a novelist’s chance of a lifetime: but these ladies did not know it, and spent their time in indignant clusters, discussing their companions and “’ow ’orid they smelled.”

At Gibraltar another swarm of belated ones had come aboard, and Billy Parish, the gambler who regularly travels from Algiers to Gibraltar and back again—“bridge only, you understand,—at sixpence a point”—had made forty pounds by pretending he had taken passage for New York, and selling out to a Wall Street stock broker “at the greatest possible inconvenience to himself”. But the really funny thing was how that Olympic-Hawke business had made all the captains so nervous—and Ponsonby, the purple captain of the Pavonia, was worst of all.

As Fitzpatrick sauntered back to his post in the wireless house, the were all filing in to dinner, and the deck stewards were darting around among the old ladies, with sloppy trays of lukewarm bouillon and soggy sea biscuit. A condensed odor, thick to the eye as a London fog, was working along the passageways, heavy with the steam of the soup caldrons, the smell of damp table-linen, of Castile soap, onions, oxalic acid, and warm upholstery. The string band was trying to be heard above the clatter of dishes, valiantly sawing out, “Oh, You Beautiful Doll,” and the stewards were fighting for places around the scullery windows, giving each other the lie in polite cockney with ”Oh, I s’y, I ’m first there now, Denby!” and “You swine, you took my plyte! Give it ’ere, now!”

Inside the saloon, three hundred passengers were beginning to gorge stomachs, which should have been left entirely alone with canned caviare, Scotch broth, boiled cod, celery, radishes, English mutton chops,—pheasant, sir, with the ’ead steward’s compliments,—Tipsy pudding, Neapolitan ice-cream, assorted cakes, grapes, bananas, and coffee, washed down with heavy draughts of Apollinaris water. The great event of the day was in full progress.

Micky winked at the purser as he slid by the latter’s grating.

“No more news!” he grinned. “Cap’n’s orders!”

“The deuce you say!” muttered, the rat-faced financier, and went on unconcernedly counting up neat piles of half-crowns.

The second-cabin deck was clear, save for an invalid Italian woman lying on a steamer-chair in the shelter of a canvas windbreak. A sailor was picking up the scattered rope circles of a suddenly abandoned game of “ring-toss.” Micky ran up his ladder and opened the door of his office. There were Mrs. Trevelyan and a dark gentleman with waxed moustaches in a long green ulster, calmly eating pheasant from his operating-desk. A quart of champagne stood in a bucket of ice on the floor beside them.

“Ah, there you are!” cried the gay lady. “Lord Ashurst, let me introduce to you my very particular friend, Mr. Micky Fitzpatrick.”

“Glad to know you!” nodded his lordship, his mouth full of pheasant. “Awfully jolly up here you know. Quite rippin’, in fact. So beastly hot in that saloon, one can’t eat.”

“Sit down, do,” said Mrs. Trevelyan “I know you want to put us out, but it would n’t be polite—would it, Ashurst?”

“Assuredly not!” he answered. “Have a cigarette?”

“No thanks,” replied Micky. “I ’m very sorry, but I have to go down to lunch. By the way, if anybody calls up, just send ’em a few ‘V’s’ and take the message, will you?”

“Impudence!” smiled Mrs. Trevelyan.

Soon she finished her pheasant, and, Micky having vanished down the ladder, began to examine the contents of the office through her gold lorgnette.

“That must be his sweetheart!” she remarked suddenly, pointing to the photograph over the bunk—“that leggy little girl with the big dog.”

Ashurst arose stiffly, carefully wiped his mustache with his napkin, and inspected the picture.

“Well, I ’m shot!” he ejaculated, in amazement.

“Why, may I ask?” inquired Mrs. Trevelyan, “and why do you invariably say you ’re shot?”

Ashurst ignored the latter half of her question.

“That’s Evelyn Farquhar!” he gasped.

Mrs. Trevelyan burst into silvery-toned giggles, while Ashurst gave her a sheepish look.

“Rather rough on you, eh, boysie?” she laughed.

Mrs. Trevelyan and a dark gentleman were calmly eating from his operating-desk

His lordship poured out some champagne.

“Really, you know, that ’s rather a stunner!” he admitted.

“It is, if what everybody said was true,” answered his companion—“that she turned you down hard at Biarritz last May. Anyhow, she 's engaged to Cosmo Hamilton at last—it was announced about a month ago. I wonder where Micky got that picture.”

“I—I never—asked her—really,” he protested. “Rum sort of a child, but an awful ripper!”

“Never mind, old chap!” cooed Mrs. Trevelyan soothingly. “You ’ve still got me.”

“Yes, until Trevelyan comes out in a tug off Fire Island,” he retorted dryly, wrinkling his nose.

“Well, cheer up—and give me a cigarette!” she admonished him. “Let ’s have a good time while it lasts.”

The deck-house, or “Island,” of the Pavonia is designated to accommodate second-class passengers, but the rooms are large and catch more air than those in the main body of the ship, for the port-holes look straight forward and straight aft. As Micky dropped down his ladder, he nearly landed on a tall man in a shabby ulster, the collar of which was turned up so as almost to hide the wearer’s face. A soft hat was drawn down to cover his eyes. The man started and drew back into the shadow.

“I beg your pardon!” exclaimed Micky, who reralled the fact that this particular passenger had come aboard with a few others at Gibraltar.

The man muttered something indistinctly.

“Coming down to lunch?” continued the Marconi man politely. “You ’re at my table, you know—the one on the right as you go in.”

“No, thanks; I ’m not feeling very fit,” replied the other, and, turning, he opened the door of one of the second-class state-rooms and disappeared inside.

Micky shrugged his shoulders.

“Affable!” he remarked to himself. “But rather a swell-looking beggar at that!”

Then he descended to the second-cabin saloon where he and his like belonged.