Читать книгу Hidden Country - Henry Oyen - Страница 9

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I stepped to the port rail and bared my head to the young Spring breeze. I was disgusted. The sense of something uncleanly seemed to cling to me from the spectacle on the fore-deck and I was grateful for the antiseptic feel of the wind with its pure odors.

“Pretty raw, wasn’t it, Mr. Pitt?”

I looked up and saw Pierce, the young wireless operator, standing beside me.

“Yep. I feel that way about it, too,” he went on. “Not that I’ve got anything against seeing a good battle any time, ’cause I was raised back o’ the Yards in Chicago, and no more need be said. But that—that go forward, that was too raw. Garvin, he’s a sure ’nough pug—he stayed ten rounds with Sharkey once when Tom was starting, but the poor stew was about ready to have the ‘willies’; and the poor dinge was seeing snakes. Naw, it was too raw. Ear-eating and that kind of stuff. They hadn’t ought to have matched ’em. They couldn’t put up half a battle, the shape they was.”

“I didn’t object to it on those grounds,” I said, and as I looked at his merry, freckled face I was forced to smile. “Though I can appreciate your artistic disapproval. It disgusted me because it was so useless and brutal.”

“That’s what I said,” he responded promptly. “It was useless, because it wasn’t half a go, and brutal because they wasn’t in shape to stand the punishment.”

“We are slightly apart in our view-points, I am afraid, Mr. Pierce.”

“But you’re with me that it was bum match-making?”

I nodded.

“And that a right guy—you know what I mean: a guy who was right all the way through—couldn’t get any fun out of watching it?”

I nodded again. Pierce placed both hands on the railing, running his fingers up and down as if on a keyboard, whistling softly through his teeth.

“Did you notice how the boss ate it up?” he said abruptly.

“Mr. Chanler?”

“Yep. He eyed it like—like it was a pretty little thing to him.”

I said nothing. Pierce resumed his whistling and finger-practise on the rail. Suddenly he turned and faced me squarely, his countenance uncomfortably serious, as it had been on the dock that morning.

“I suppose you’re thinking what an awful dub I am to be making a crack about the boss to one of his friends, ain’t you, Mr. Pitt?”

“Well, to be frank,” I replied, “I have been wondering at your doing so. How do you know that I won’t go straight to Mr. Chanler with your words? I won’t do it, of course, but I would prefer that you do not discuss Mr. Chanler with me. One doesn’t do such things, you know.”

“No,” he said, “I didn’t know; I was raised back o’ the Yards. But if you say, ‘nix on it,’ nix it is. What—what do you think of the boat, Mr. Pitt? We can discuss that, can’t we?”

“Freely,” I laughed. “From what I’ve seen the Wanderer is a remarkable yacht.”

“And you haven’t seen anything but the gingerbread work. I’m off watch. Come on; let’s walk around and pipe her off. It’ll take the taste of that bum battle out of your mouth.”

I accepted willingly, and for an hour Pierce piloted me about the yacht.

The Wanderer is a craft of wonders. I have Pierce’s word that the yacht is 152 feet long on the water line with her present load, and that the load is the maximum which we could carry with safety. Her size below the cabin deck is amazing. In her engine room are some of the largest gasoline engines ever placed in a yacht, if Pierce’s information is correct. There are two great gleaming batteries of them, each battery capable of driving us at a speed of ten knots an hour, the two combined able to hurry us along at fourteen knots, if necessary. Besides this we have a small auxiliary engine and propeller, a novelty installed by the former owner, Harrison. We could smash both of our major engines and the auxiliary still would move us.

Built into the bows are the reserve gasoline tanks. There is enough fuel in them, says Pierce, to drive the Wanderer twice around the world. Aft of these vast tanks are the storerooms. They are locked. Captain Brack has the key, but Freddy assures me that enough provisions have been loaded into them to keep our company of fifteen men well fed for two years.

“Which certainly is playing safe, seeing as we’re not supposed to get frozen in,” said he, as we completed our tour below decks. “Now, come on and I’ll show you my private office.”

He led the way up a ladder to the little wireless house on the aft of the main cabin. This was Pierce’s room. His bunk was beside the table on which were his instruments, and he had covered the walls—“decorated,” he called it—with newspaper cuts of celebrated baseball players, pugilists, motor-racers, and women of the musical comedy stage. Lajoie’s picture was next to Terry McGovern’s, and Chevrolet’s beside Miss Anna Held’s. I smiled as I seated myself.

“Something of a connoisseur, I see, Pierce.”

“Whatever that means,” he responded. He had become serious again. He took a cigaret paper from his pocket, absently tore it to pieces and sat glancing out over the waters of the Sound.

“So you don’t know a Jane—a girl named Miss Beatrice Baldwin, Mr. Pitt?” he said, as if he had been thinking of saying it for a long time.

“You asked me that this morning,” said I. “Why do you think I might know her?”

“You’n’ the Boss is close friends, ain’t you?”

“I wouldn’t say ‘close friends’.”

“I know. But you know him back East, and train with him, and know the bunch he trains with back there, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes, to a certain extent.”

“That’s why I thought you might have heard of this Jane—Miss Baldwin, I mean.”

“I assure you, Pierce,” I said, smiling, “that one would have to possess a much larger circle of acquaintances than I have to know all the young ladies of Mr. Chanler’s acquaintance.”

He looked up.

“Is he that kind of a guy?” he asked.

“What kind do you mean?”

“A charmer, a Jane-chaser, lady-killer?”

The perfect naiveté with which he uttered this outrageous slang brought me to hearty laughter, the first of long time.

“Mr. Chanler,” I said, suppressing my amusement, “is a much sought after man.”

“Sure; he’s got the dough. But does he chase ’em back? Eh? Is he—Here, I’ll put it up to you straight: would you let your own sister go walking with him alone in the park after dark?”

I rose. But for the life of me I could not hold offense in the face of his honest, worried expression.

“Pierce,” I said, “that is another thing one does not do—ask such questions. And I have told you that you are not to discuss Mr. Chanler with me.”

“Aw, the devil!” he blurted. “Why can’t you be human? You’re a reg’lar fellow; I can see it in the back of your eyes. I’m a reg’lar fellow. Why can’t we get together?”

“Not on a discussion of Mr. Chanler behind his back,” I chuckled. “It isn’t done.”

Pierce doubled himself up on the stool which he was sitting on and grasped his thin ankles in his hands.

“All right, then,” he said moodily. “But I want to tell you I’ve been handling messages between the boss and a Miss Beatrice Baldwin; and he sent her one this morning and got a reply; and—I wished I’d never learned wireless, that’s all.”

“Mr. Chanler is a gentleman,” I said severely.

“A gentleman?” said Pierce gloomily. “I suppose that makes it all right, then, eh? But nevertheless and notwithstanding, I wish I hadn’t learned wireless, just the same. And you don’t even ask me what the message was about,” he continued as I remained silent. “That’s the difference: I’d have asked first crack; you’re a gent. You don’t ask at all.”

“Naturally not,” I replied. “That’s another thing one doesn’t do. I won’t even permit you to tell me what it was.”

“You won’t?”

“Decidedly not.”

“Not even if I tell you——”

“No.”

“All right then,” he said with a comical air of resignation and relief. “I’ve done me jooty. It’s something out of my class; I wanted to pass it up to somebody with a better nut than I’ve got; but if I can’t—all right. I suppose after you ’n’ me ’ve known each other five or six years we’ll be well enough acquainted to talk together like a couple o’ human beings, eh? I know I hadn’t ought to be talking to you like this, Mr. Pitt; you’re a New York highbrow and I’m from back o’ the Yards; but I’ll make you a nice little bet right now, that before this trip is over—if you’re the guy I think you are, Brains—you ’n’ me’ll tear off more’n one little confab behind the boss’s back, and you’ll be darn glad to do it.”

I rose to go.

“I can imagine no reason why we should,” I said. “This is a scientific expedition; you are the wireless operator, and I am Mr. Chanler’s literary secretary. Under the circumstances, why should you be willing to bet?”

“Under those circumstances, I wouldn’t be willing to bet,” he retorted. “But—scientific expedition!” he exploded in disgust. “Scientific ——!”