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Updated: September 27, 2024
He looked as though in a trance and some stormy spirit was struggling within him. The sweat ran off us in streams as we stood there in the light of a couple of slush-lamps flaring in the draught from the stokehold door. Then he abruptly abandoned his search for vitriolic language and rushed into the store for a piece of brass rod. It was a curious performance. I was impressed.
He's got to look out for land on every side." Right over my bunk where I slept, ceaselessly turned and turned the propeller shaft. The noise and roar of the engines was ever in my ears, and the peculiar ocean-like noise of the stokehold ... and the metallic clang of coal as it shot from shovels....
Leading stoker Grant, said to be a bigamist, an ox-eyed man smothered in hair, took me to the stokehold and planted me between a searing white furnace and some hell-hot iron plate for fifteen minutes, while I listened to the drone of fans and the worry of the sea without, striving to wrench all that palpitating firepot wide open.
Sometimes the hollow channel-seas that buried the plunging forecastle filled the decks and icy cataracts came down the stokehold gratings. Sometimes the cattle pens broke and mangled bullocks rolled about in the water and wreckage. Robertson had a talent for narrative and Barbara felt something of the terror and lure of the sea.
The fourth was a sailor, either asleep or unconscious, and Courtenay thought he recognized a severe bruise on the man's left temple where the butt of his revolver had struck hard. When he returned on deck he learned that two other members of the crew, in addition to the cook, were able to work. Walker had set one to clear up the stokehold; his companion, a fireman, had relieved Mr. Tollemache.
"As you are here, won't you tell the ladies there is nothing to be afraid of in the mere stopping of the engines?" he suggested. "Oh, the ship is right enough," was the hasty response. "There has been an accident in the stokehold. That is all." "Want any help?" demanded the American. "Well I'll ask the captain." Evidently anxious to avoid further questioning, he ran up the companion.
"Swept from end to end, by God!" bawled Jukes. She dipped into the hollow straight down, as if going over the edge of the world. The engine-room toppled forward menacingly, like the inside of a tower nodding in an earthquake. An awful racket, of iron things falling, came from the stokehold.
The stokehold ventilators hummed: in front of the six fire-doors two wild figures, stripped to the waist, staggered and stooped, wrestling with two shovels. "Hallo! Plenty of draught now," yelled the second engineer at once, as though he had been all the time looking out for Jukes.
"Give me anything with hands on it apes, niggers, stokers, what you like, and I'll soon teach them their dancing steps." Captain Image pulled at his moustache. "The trouble of it is, we are short everywhere. It's been a sickly voyage, this. I couldn't let you have more than two out of the stokehold, and even if we take those, the old Chief will be fit to eat me.
From the glint of the raised weapon he bounced backward against the rail, where he leaned incoherently snarling like a cornered dog. "Hi didn't sign as no blymed stoker," he growled at last. "Hi won't go " "The stokehold or hell, it's up to you." Coulter's reply came in an absolute monotony of voice strangely at variance with the passionate stress of their labored breathing.
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