XIV
DURING that same day, Keighley received various hints, from various go-betweens, that the men in power were prepared to forgive and forget if he would take the first opportunity to “make himself solid” and come into the fold. He “jollied them along,” gave them evasive answers, or turned stupid and failed to understand what they were proposing. (The weather aided him, by making activity uncomfortable even for politicians.) He had the sure hope that the courts would dismiss the charges against Chief Borden and compel his reinstatement under the Civil Service laws. He heard rumors that the Fire Commissioner had had a fallingout with “the Boss;” and he expected that with the autumn there might be changes in the department that would settle the whole quarrel. Meanwhile, it was his best policy—and his natural inclination—to stand firm. “I got nuthin’ against the ‘Jiggers,’” he replied to their emissaries. “I never did anythin’ to ’em. There’s no trouble here at all.” And if they pressed upon him the advantages of “getting square up above,” he said, “Well, I’ll think it over. I’ll think it over.”
He even received with such evasions “Tim” Noonan, the leader of the “Sixt’”—Noonan of the suave Irish diplomacy—Noonan who had served with him as a fire laddie in the red-shirt days of the volunteer fire brigade. Wherever Noonan went, he closed thedoors behind him; Keighley heard him in a silence that was irritating; and Noonan, in the breathless office, soon arrived at a blood-hot exasperation that kept boiling up red in his face.
“Well,” Keighley promised placidly, for the fourth time, “I’ll think it over.”
Noonan plucked from between his teeth the frayed butt of a cigar chewed to tatters. “Now look a-here,” he said hoarsely, “I’m yer friend I’m tellin’ yeh, Dan; but I can’t go back with no such answer. An’youknow it. Take it er leave it. There’s promotion in it the one way, an’ there’s trouble th’ other. Are yeh with us, er are yeh not, now?”
Keighley looked out the window and scratched the back of his hand. “This crew,” he said, “when I took a hold here, it was the makin’ of a mince-pie.An’ it’d ’a’ been the worst mess o’ nuthin’ in the whole department if I’d run it Jigger er anti-Jigger er anythin’ else but straight bus’ness to put out fires. I got nuthin’ against the actin’-chief ner his gang. They ain’t botherin’ me any.”
Noonan had a long, round upper lip that met a round, protruding under one in a mouth like a rent in a rubber ball. He opened it, and then shut it again in a politic effort to control his temper, “Dan,” he said at last, “I like a joke, but I’m no more a damn fool than y’ are yerself,—mind that now! Yeh’ve been fightin’ half yer comp’ny fer the month gone, an’ yeh think yeh’ve won. They ain’t botherin’ y’ any now—no. Yeh think they’ve had enough—an’ mebbe they have. Mebbe they have.But there’s them that ain’t!” He stopped himself. He plugged his mouth with his cigar again, and puffed it till it crackled. “Have sense, now,” he said. “Have sense, man. Here’s yer chance to get the best that’s goin’. Will yeh take it er leave it?”
Keighley had turned to listen to the tinkle of a telephone bell in the sitting room where the apparatus of the fire alarm was stationed.
“Will yeh take it er leave it?” Noonan demanded.
Keighley did not answer. He swung around in his swivel chair. Some one rapped at the door, and he called, “Come!”
Lieutenant Moore looked in to report, “A telephone call from headquarters. Soap works afire at Nohunk. Theywant us to keep it off the coal docks.”
They were the department’s coal docks.
Keighley ordered, “Cast off.” He turned to Noonan. “Better come along with us,” he said. “It’ll be cooler outside.”
Noonan had found it hot work trying to lead old obstinacy in the office. The boat looked inviting. There were two chairs under an awning in the fantail. “All right,” he said, and went sulkily aboard.
Keighley took him to the wheelhouse, instead of to the stern. There was, of course, a pilot at the wheel; and Noonan waited in impatient expectation that the captain would give his orders there and then go aft to finish their conversation. But as soon as the boat was under way, the men, clearing the decksfor action, began to roll up the awning and carry the chairs below; and Noonan looked at the captain with the expression of a man who had been tricked.
With his gray side-whiskers and his long lip, he was the sort of Irishman who would have made an amiable parish priest if circumstances had not made him a ward leader—the sort of man to whom politics is a benevolent affair of “gettin’ jobs” for his friends and loyally keeping them from his enemies. The only dishonesty in public office that he understood was the dishonesty of treason to the “organization,” and he despised the political renegade as he would have despised the turncoat who deserts his church.
Jigger and anti-Jigger were, as has been said so often, merely factions of the organization, and he could come toKeighley with a charitable desire to convince the captain that he was standing in his own light. Keighley and he had been young together. They were old friends, though they had not met for some time. Yet Keighley received him without trust, and held him off.
He smoked resentfully; and the head wind, through the open window of the wheelhouse, blew the cigar ashes in his eyes.
Keighley stood at the pilot’s shoulder, his hands behind him, pretending that he was watching innocently the course they steered. He said, at last, “Volunteer firemen up to Nohunk.”
Noonan blinked and grunted.
Keighley glanced at him slyly. After a pause he added, “It’ll remind y’ of ol’ times.”
He began to screw out the tortuous scrawl of his report
See page 68
Noonan understood that Keighleywas trying to placate him; and he was willing to be placated. He was not shrewd enough to see that the captain was playing on him. He smoked, somewhat mollified.
“Ol’ Dolger,” Keighley said, “the may’r—er whatever he is—he’s got all the boys with him. They elect him to ev’rythin’ up there.... D’ yuh remember the Red Crows?”
Noonan made an amicable sound of assent in his throat.
“Dolger’ll remind y’ o’ Nip himself.”
The memory of the past—the past that has always such a poetical appeal for the Celt—twisted Noonan’s lips in a pleased, reluctant smile. “Nip was a great boy,” he said. “A great boy!”
The boat was then darting and dodging through the cross traffic of thelower river. By the time the railroad terminals were passed and the breeze began to come, less bituminous, from open water, Noonan was laughing and talking, with his hat on the back of his head and a blur in his eyes. “D’ yeh mind,” he would say,—“d’ yeh mind the time I put th’ ash-bar’l over the hydrant, an’ the boys o’ Big Six went by it? Ho-ho! They near broke ev’ry bone in me body!” Or: “Will y’ ever ferget the night we run Silver Nine into the ditch at the foot o’ Chatham Hill?” Or: “Hurley, was it? Well, any way, he put his fist into me mouth, just as I opened it to yell ‘She’s over!’ an’ I set down in the road an’ coughed up teeth be the hand’ful.”
Keighley nodded and coughed, puckered his eyes appreciatively, and cracked his finger joints behind hisback. He did not laugh; it was as hard for Keighley to laugh as it is for most men to sing—when sober. Besides, he knew enough of Noonan to understand that although the politician’s joviality was not all assumed—although even the fond moisture of his eye was not from the eye only—old friendships would not change present policies, and Noonan did not intend that they should.
When Keighley caught the warm odors of fields and orchards from the Nohunk shore, he reached mechanically for the pilot’s glasses. “Them was wild days,” he said, focusing the binoculars.
“We ust to hang together well enoughthen, Dan,” Noonan insinuated.
Keighley studied a mist of light smoke that lay along the water’s edge, and worked his lips in the twitching ofa dryly contemptuous smile. Then he dropped his cap on the chair beside him—without lowering the glasses—and with one hand began to loosen his necktie. “Looks like Dolger’s got his work cut out fer ’m,” he said.
The boat went throbbing through the water at a “fourteen-mile gait.” There was silence in the wheelhouse.
“Take us in south o’ th’ ol’ pier,” Keighley ordered. He caught the heel of one boot with the toe of the other, and jerked off the elastic gaiter; the glasses did not leave his eyes. “If yuh’d like to come in with us, Tim, I can give y’ a turnout,” he said to Noonan. A fireman passed under the window. “Bring me me rubbers,” Keighley ordered him, without looking down. “Yuh’re allowin’ fer the current, are yuh?” he said to the pilot. LieutenantMoore came to the doorway. “Get the starboard lines out,” Keighley directed, without turning. He kicked off the other gaiter, after loosening it with the toe of his stockinged foot. “It’ll remind y’ of ol’ times,” he said to Noonan. And his orders and his remarks were all given in the same absent-minded voice of a man who has his eyes fixed and his mind busy on another matter.
Noonan laughed admiringly. “That aint the way Nip ust to give his orders, Dan,” he said.