The Fortune of the Indies/Chapter 8
CHAPTER VIII
THE DELPHIAN
HIGH and gray the Delphian lay at her pier in the North River, with her big cargo-hatches open and a confusion of stevedores stowing the last of her cargo. She was quite new, and compared with the battered and dingy tramps of Eesthaven Harbor, she looked like a magnificent ocean liner. It was drizzling a little; the New York skyline was a monotone of slate color and the buildings lost cloudy tops in the mist. Mr. Bolliver went aboard with Mark and Alan, and in the captain's comfortable quarters they all talked of this and that for nearly an hour. Mark had all his papers and a note-book almost half full of advice and instructions from Mr. Bolliver, and the boys felt by this time as though Shanghai lay at their feet. Mr. Bolliver put a hand on the shoulder of each and said, "Don't disappoint any of us," and was gone.
It was nearly time for the Delphian, also, to be gone. While Mark was changing into dungaree in his quarters and Alan stood beside the young chief Marconi man in the wireless-room, there came a premonitory shiver and a throbbing throughout the ship, and a rushing of steam and shouting from the dock, and she thrashed a great seething mass of lemon-green water astern. A tug was helping her into the river, fussing very close to her with tremendous puffings and sizzlings. At last she floated out, heading down-stream, and passed gravely across the harbor, and New York lost her as she steamed slowly into the Narrows with her nose seaward.
Mark's first watch was not until midnight, but he went to the engine-room at once to report, and then to listen and look and learn. Up in the wireless-room, perched above the bridge-deck, Alan was having his first practical experience. He had caught many a flying message before this, but he suddenly felt hugely responsible and rather frightened as he fastened the microphone over his head and realized that he was, for the time, the ears of the ship. And then came her code-call. The blue sparks leapt, the chief murmured, "All right, I've got 'em, too. Take it, boy," and Alan flashed back with the Delphian's answering signal. Then the message came:
New York 3:22 P.M. Mark and Alan Ingram. Good Luck. Godspeed. H. B. Bolliver.
Sandy Hook had dimmed to a gray gleam astern; ahead there was nothing at all but slatey sea, with the last bay-gulls screaming and dropping back. Alan felt as though Mr. Bolliver's hand had reached out from that gray line and clapped him again on the shoulder. It was an instant before he could acknowledge the message, for China, at that moment, did not seem so near, across the dull water.
Mark went on his first watch fifteen minutes before eight bells. He was perfectly aware that the eye of the first assistant engineer was firmly on him, but he decided to behave as though he had been an oiler all his life. Before the watch was called he was busily employed seeing that the journals were running cool, feeling the crossheads and guides, and descending to touch the great flying crankpin with that peculiar swinging motion of the hand that he had practised diligently. He saw that enough oil was ready for the watch, and turned up as eight bells was striking to report, with a grin, to his chief.
"You're in a fair way to learn your trade, son," drawled the engineer. "I noticed you felt only one side of the crankpin brasses, but I guess you'll feel both sides next time."
"I surely will, sir!" said Mark, and departed to the shaft-alley.
The shaft-alley is a strange place, hooded over with steel barely head high. Nothing lives there but the shaft, turning ceaselessly by itself, and the thrust-blocks working away. Mark had been in plenty of shaft-alleys on Resthaven freighters, but then the ships were anchored, the propellers still. Now, as he went on toward the stern to look at the tail-shaft stuffing-box, he realized how near he was to a whole sea outside. Water beat around with strange, hollow sounds; the big screw plunged and swirled just beyond the echoing steel walls. The water-noises were insistent; Mark had suddenly the feeling of being imprisoned in a narrow tube which was tumbling down through wild seas. The shaft-alley somehow was very remote and not a very jolly place, he decided. He was glad to come back to the bright engine-room, to the big, stamping engines, and the hot, common-place figures of his comrades on watch.
The engine-room, on a summer night, is not the coolest of places. It is not quite so hot as the fire-room, Mark reflected philosophically, but he decided that he was nearly as warm and active as the crossheads, and quite as oily. He went on deck at four o'clock, when the morning watch was called, and stood for a little while at the rail before turning in. There was not a star, not a gleam from the Delphian's wake—nothing but a blanket of moist cool darkness filled with the whisper of the ship's way. He glanced up at the wireless-room and wondered if Alan was off watch or on, and at the dark wheel-room, where the silent quartermasters were pointing the Delphian on down the coast. Mark walked across the deck to the starboard side and saw, far off, the fixed white gleam of a lighthouse, and wondered what light it was and how far on her way to Shanghai the Delphian had churned. Then, yawning tremendously, he tumbled to his own little cubicle, where his shore-clothes, not yet in their looker, swung rhythmically from a hook. The port-hole showed a slip of sky that waited already for the dawn.
With surprisingly quick adjustment, life on the Delphian soon became the actuality and Resthaven seemed like a gray dream ten thousand miles astern. As the ship would not make any port until she reached the Canal, there was no mail to be received nor letters dispatched, and the boys lived in an isolated world of new interests, with hardly a thought for the old. At first they kept somewhat to themselves, meeting off watch and discussing their own affairs and their respective duties. But the younger members of the ship's personnel would not allow this seclusion very long. Deck and engine-room met amicably around the battered victrola in the junior officers' uarters, and Mark and Alan learned to play their part in he small social world of the ship, as well as in its business.
The youngest engineer was possessed of a banjo, and made the bridge-deck resound with strains of New York jazz. Somehow, it was discovered that Mark could sing, in a voice just settling to a fine baritone, and he was more in demand than his modesty relished. Resthaven is not very learned in the latest jazz. Mark sang chanteys that his great-grandfather's men had roared as they tramped around the capstan, and the syncopated singers of the Delphian listened, approving and impressed, and admitted that "those old fellows sure did know how to sling the harmony." The youngest engineer tamed his instrument sufficiently to pick out somber chords in accompaniment to "Bony was a Warrior" and "Old Stormalong," and a new musical craze swept the Delphian, even reaching to the ears of the silent captain in his chintz-curtained cabin.
But songs claimed the least part of shipboard days. Alan, in his little high-perched cubicle, hung fascinated above his wireless instruments while the silent, unseen sound-waves flung forth their mysterious antennae over the sea. Mark, in the engine-room or out of it, studied and pondered continuously, his head filled with "lap and lead," the pitch and slip of a screw, and the thousand intricacies of the big triple expansion engine. He almost forgot, perhaps, the errand that had made an oiler of him, and lived only in the present with its new, absorbing occupations.
It had been rumored about the ship, however, through those mysterious channels by which news runs, that the young Ingrams were bound on a quest of untold fortune appropriated by wily mandarins. Mark, laughingly denying this in the engineers' mess, met suddenly the narrow eyes of Chun Lon, the mess-boy, who was passing him the potatoes. Just a swift, inscrutable, black gleam—wholly impersonal—but somehow Mark felt all at once a cold, discouraging premonition of the kind of people he must deal with before he reached the descendants of T'ang Min and claimed his two hundred thousand taels. He spoke gloomily of his feeling to Alan, whom he met off watch that afternoon.
"Not like dealing with regular civilized people," he said. "That is, in some ways they're too civilized, if you know what I mean."
"I don't," said Alan.
"They can know such a lot without letting on that they do or saying anything at all," Mark continued; "or they certainly look as if they did."
"We've never come across any Chinks but laundrymen and mess-boys and such," said Alan. "Perhaps aristocracy is different."
"They'd be even more civilized," sighed Mark, shaking his head.
Suddenly, unbelievably to the boys, the Delphian was in tropic waters. Patches of gulf-weed floated by, just below the surface of the immense smooth swell, a swell so vast that though the ship rolled to it, eye could scarcely see the climbing crest of the next great polished roller. Flying-fish skipped and skimmed above a sea incredibly blue; the Ingrams felt that they had never before known what blue was till they faced this limitless field of living color. The sky was not very blue; it was pale and shimmering, filled with tremulous heat and bare of cloud, and at night new stars climbed above the Delphian's funnels. The nights were as hot as the days—hotter, Mark thought. Clothes were nearly intolerable; the engine-room became a place of torture, and Mark, gasping on deck after a watch, envied Alan in his lofty wireless-room.
They passed among the upper Bahamas at night, and one morning found the Delphian steaming toward the Windward Passage, with strange lands risen suddenly to meet the swift tropic dawn. The sea was not blue now, but deep purple; sometimes a shark's pointed fin flashed and hovered alongside. Unknown islands raised blue spire-like shapes on the horizon, appeared like mirage, to disappear; faintly gold, nebulously blue, ethereal, fantastic mountains poised on the sea-line, shimmering into a hot blur over the wake. Then there was nothing but the violet sea and the strumming of the warm wind about the Delphian's rigging as she swung into the Passage, left a gleam of Cape Maisi astern, and steamed into the Jamaica Channel. The dark pulsing reaches of the Caribbean stretched before her. By day the paint cracked on her decks under an empty sky of lilac heat. By night she tossed a welter of unearthly phosphorescence behind her, and her bows writhed with green fire. Above, the Cross swung low, and Dorado smoldered splendidly.
At Colon there was mail, and time to answer it. Long and impassioned scrawls came from Jane; neat, anxious notes from the aunts; a sage and kindly letter from Mr. Bolliver; an envious word or two from stay-at-home schoolmates. Mark, smiling over Jane's effusion and reading as he walked to his stateroom, collided squarely with Chun Lon, the mess-boy, just outside the door. Chun Lon ducked out of the way with an apologetic grin.
"Confound him!" Mark thought, slamming the door. "What's he doing here, anyway? I'm always stepping on him somewhere."
Whereupon he sat down on the edge of his bunk to finish his sister's letter.