Part 35 (1/2)

Joe looked at me a moment.

”They'll do so much more than drink,” he said. ”Come on,” he added.

”They're going aboard.”

They were forming in a long line now before the third-cla.s.s gang-plank.

As they went up with their packs on their shoulders, a man at the top gave each a shove and shouted out a number, which another official checked off in a book. The latter I learned was the chief engineer. He was a lean, powerful, ruddy-faced man with a plentiful store of profanity which he poured out in a torrent:

”Come on! For Christ's sake! Do you want to freeze solid, you ---- human bunch of stiffs?”

We came up the plank at the end of the line, and I showed him a letter which I had procured admitting us to the engine rooms. He turned us over promptly to one of his junior engineers, and we were soon climbing down oily ladders through the intricate parts of the engines, all polished, glistening, carefully cleaned. And then climbing down more ladders until we were, as I was told, within ten feet of the keel of the s.h.i.+p, we came into the stokers' quarters.

And here nothing at all was carefully cleaned. The place was foul, its painted steel walls and floor and ceiling were heavily encrusted with dirt. The low chamber was crowded with rows of bunks, steel skeleton bunks three tiers high, the top tier just under the ceiling. In each was a thin, dirty mattress and blanket. In some of these men were already asleep, breathing hard, snoring and wheezing. Others were crowded around their bags intent on something I could not see. Many were smoking, the air was blue. Some were almost naked, and the smells of their bodies filled the place. It was already stifling.

”Had enough?” asked our young guide, with a grin.

”No,” I said, with an answering superior smile. ”We'll stay a while and get it all.”

And after a little more talk he left us.

”How do you like our home?” asked Joe.

”I'm here now,” I said grimly. ”Go ahead and show me. And try to believe that I want to be shown.”

”All right, here comes our breakfast.”

Two stokers were bringing in a huge boiler. They set it down on the dirty floor. It was full of a greasy, watery soup with a thick, yellow sc.u.m on the top, through which chunks of pork and potato bobbed up here and there.

”This is scouse,” Joe told me. Men eagerly dipped tin cups in this and gulped it down. The chunks of meat they ate with their hands. They ate sitting on bunks or standing between them. Some were wedged in close around a bunk in which lay a sleeper who looked utterly dead to the world. His face was white.

”He reminds me,” said Joe, ”of a fellow whose bunk was once next to mine. He was s.h.i.+pped at Buenos Ayres, where the crimps still handle the business. A crimp had carried this chap on board, dumped him, got his ten dollars and left. The man was supposed to wake up at sea and shovel coal. But this one didn't. The second day out some one leaned over and touched him and yelled. The crimp had sold us a dead one.”

As Joe said this he stared down at the sleeper, a curious tensity in his eyes.

”Joe, how did you ever stand this life?”

My own voice almost startled me, it sounded so suddenly tense and strained. Joe turned and looked at me searchingly, with a trace of that old affection of his.

”I didn't, Kid,” he said gruffly. ”The two years almost got me. And that's what happens to most of 'em here. Half of 'em,” he added, ”are down-and-outers when they start. They're what the factories and mills and all the rest of this lovely modern industrial world throw out as no more wanted. So they drift down here and take a job that n.o.body else will take, it's so rotten, and here they have one week of h.e.l.l and another week's good drunk in port. And when the barrooms and the women and all the waterfront sharks have stripped 'em of their last red cent, then the crimps collect an advance allotment from their future wages to s.h.i.+p 'em off to sea again.”

”That's not true in _this_ port,” I retorted, eagerly catching him up on the one point that I knew was wrong. ”They don't allow crimps in New York any more.”

”No,” Joe answered grimly. ”The port of New York has got reformed, it's become all for efficiency now. The big companies put up money for a kind of a seamen's Y. M. C. A. where they try to keep men sober ash.o.r.e, and so get 'em back quick into holes like these, in the name of Christ.

”But there's one thing they forget,” he added bitterly. ”The age of steam has sent the old-style sailors ash.o.r.e and s.h.i.+pped these fellows in their places. And that makes all the difference. These chaps didn't grow up on s.h.i.+ps and get used to being kicked and cowed and shot for mutiny if they struck. No, they're all grown up on land, in factories where they've been in strikes, and they bring their factory views along into these floating factories. And they don't like these stinking holes! They don't like their jobs, with no day and no night, only steel walls and electric light! You hear a shout at midnight and you jump down into the stokehole and work like h.e.l.l till four a. m., when you crawl up all soaked in sweat and fall asleep till the next shout. And you do this, not as the sailor did for a captain he knew and called 'the old man,'

but for a corporation so big it has rules and regulations for you like what they have in the navy. You're nothing but a number. Look here.”

He took me to a bulletin that had just been put up on the wall. Around it men were eagerly crowding.