VIII
TWENTY minutes later, the last of the fire had been drowned out; theHudson’slines had all been picked up; and the crew sat along the bulwarks, eating bananas and waiting for the order to start back to their house. Cripps and Sturton, “Shine” and Farley were perched in a row along the edge of the engine-room skylight, “in their birthday clo’s,” each with a banana in his hand and a bulge in his cheek, fraternizing while they dried.
Sturton was saying, with an air of ownership, “She’s a peach of a boat, jus’ the same. We c’u’d’ve swamped out that blaze ourselves, if there hadn’t been a steamer on the island.”
“Shine,” blinking watery-eyed, condemned the fire in resentful anathemas and bit savagely on the banana. “Damn scorch burned my pipes so I can’t taste nuthin’,” he complained.
Farley, with the tears still running down his cheeks, swung his heels blissfully, chewed, and regarded the lights of the city. “It’s hot work,” he said. “It’s hot work, all right. But how’d yuh like to be pushin’ a pen in one o’ them little furnaces, fer instance?” He nodded at the late lights in the upper windows of a distant office building. “One o’ them newspaper touts was tryin’ to pump me th’other day about that fire in the cotton. ‘Say,’ he says, ‘what takes you men into the fire department?’ ‘Oh, the pay,’ I says. ‘The pay.’ ‘Hell!’ he says, ‘the money’s nogood to a dead man. Look at Bresnan.’”
“The damn mut!” “Shine” put in. “’T’wasn’t Bresnan’s fault he got nipped.”
“He didn’t mean it that way,” Cripps said.
“Well, howdidhe mean it?” “Shine” demanded.
Farley waved his banana skin at the high building. “He meant ’at when it comes to this sort o’ bus’ness he’d sooner be settin’ up in one o’ them hen-coops peckin’ at an ink bottle an’ scratchin’ at a desk.” He gave a grotesque imitation of a clerk humped over his work, dipping his pen frantically, and writing, with his nose to the paper.
Cripps laughed and threw his banana at the pier. “To the woods with him!”he said. “Gi’me a banana that’s ripe. That last one tasted like a varnish shop.”
Captain Keighley rose, in his uniform, from the ladder of the engine room behind them, and caught the general smile. He heard Cripps say, “This suits me all right.” There were satisfied grunts of assent from the others. At the stern, Lieutenant Moore sat somewhat apart, spitting over the rail.
“Get yer clothes on,” Keighley ordered gruffly. “Cast off there, Moore!”
And when theHudsonwas spinning back leisurely to her quarters with a trail of banana skins in her wake, he said to his lieutenant in the wheel house, “I want yuh to see th’ engineer to-morrah an’ write a report to headquarterson that low pressure cylinder bus’ness.”
Moore looked up to find the cool grey eyes fixed on him in a calculation of how much enmity there was left in him. He flushed. “Yes, sir,” he said, almost gratefully.
Keighley turned away before he added with an effect of kindliness, “All right. Dady’ll explain about it to yuh to-morrah. Go out an’ tell those boys we want some bananas in here. I guess we’re smoked as dry as they are.”
It was not that Keighley felt the impulse of any unguarded generosity. He knew his fire-department too well forthat! For there is this peculiarity in firemen: being free of any business worries or other anxieties concerning their incomes, they spend their days in efforts to “get even,” to avenge slightsand repay friendships. They are men of no philosophy, unable to get outside of themselves into any calm view of their troubles, incapable of forgiving an injury and unable to understand such a capability in others; and they despise particularly the “quitter” and the “ingrate.” Keighley did not wish to be sneered at, by his men, as a “quitter”; and he knew that if Moran did not help the “Jiggers” in their quarrel with their captain, they would consider the deputy-chief an “ingrate.” The fight was “to a finish,” whatever interludes of good-natured fellowship might happen to relieve it.
Keighley knew it. He merely accepted the truce in the spirit of a “game” antagonist who could fight without malice and win without spite.
He saw the boat berthed, watched themen go off to their beds, and then turned in himself—relieved to be free of his daily reports—with a feeling that the truce would last over the next day, at least, which was Sunday.